On a Mother-Daughter Road Trip In Germany, It's Hops vs. Grapes

The Wine

Driving along the wine routes, we settled quickly into our roles: I turned out to be a better navigator, while Beck enjoyed driving the few speedy autobahns we took and the twisty wine routes.

But we had a rather slow learning curve when it came to directions. Signs give you the next city en route, not north or south, and rarely road numbers. Signs with grapes or a wineglass denote the wine routes, and they are posted haphazardly. On a good day, we'd get lost only once or twice or thrice. On a bad day . . . we'd rather forget about those.

We gaped at the passing landscape of flowers and vines everywhere as we zipped along the curves of the rivers. Romantic villages such as St. Goar and Boppard on the Rhine and Bernkastel-Kues on the Mosel were crammed between the banks and the slopes, with grapes butting up against the town walls.

We hit our first wine-tasting at Kloster Eberbach, a 12th-century monastery turned wine co-op about 20 miles southwest of Wiesbaden. We were poured a flinty, good-bodied Riesling. The next pour was from a pricier Riesling -- definitely a more intense taste and feel, we agreed, and we bought a bottle.

As we wound along the Rhine, a succession of wineries and towns followed, each one furthering our education. At Schloss Vollrads, in the hills behind Oestrich-Winkel, we learned about the glass fee: Tourists love souvenirs, so vintners charge an extra euro or so for the wineglass. In Bacharach, named for the Roman wine god Bacchus, we marveled at the town walls supporting its famed steep vineyards.

Like most, I had had the impression that all German wines were sweet, too sweet for my Napa-influenced taste buds. Wrong. This myth of sweet wines actually came about, some believe, because vintners tried to make their wines more appealing to American GIs stationed in their country, and to their own poor countrymen who craved sweetness because of sugar rationing during the world wars.

Today's wines strive for a balance between sweetness and acidity, just as anywhere else in the wine world. German wines, trying to appeal to foreign markets and debunk the sweet myth, may add to their labels trocken ( meaning very dry), halbtrocken (half dry, which is still pretty dry) or, for export, "classic" or "selection."

The region's best vineyards cling to the south-facing slopes where the Rhine settles down and makes its longest loop, known as the Boppard Hamm. If you want to taste the vino, you have to find a wine co-op or store in one of the villages or make a reservation to visit a winery.

It wasn't until we arrived at Koblenz, where the Rhine is joined by the Mosel, that the wine country stole my heart. We turned south to follow the path of the Mosel, whose south slopes are the most valued and make a dramatic rise from the river. Any bit of level, terraced soil is planted with grapes, some only one row deep and surrounded by protruding rock walls.

I read aloud from a guidebook, informing Beck that it's mainly middle-aged women who tend those vineyards, working at an extremely steep angle, their footing a bed of slippery pieces of slate, sometimes with cables and pulleys to help manage their harvests. That could be you, she said.

A few moments later we were in the village of Winningen, where there was one tacky souvenir I had to have: a weinhex, a stuffed witch riding a broomstick made of grapevines. According to legend, a 17th-century grower in these steep vineyards once caught the "witch" who had been topping off his and others' best barrels. It was his own wife.

Hmm. That really could be me.