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

By Beth Wiegand
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 22, 2006

Beer and a college student. Well, yeah.

Beer and a college student and her mom and Rieslings and Gerwurztraminers. Well . . . maybe.

My daughter Beck and I recently spent a week touring the wine routes of southwestern Germany, which is, paradoxically, also the vonderland of beer. She's a 21-year-old university student into sampling different brews, and I'm a 55-year-old mother of three who loves red wine. My beer of choice is anything light, while Beck chooses wine for the animals on the label.

We found there was a lot to learn from each other. Among the vineyards of the Rhine and Mosel rivers, I taught Beck the four S's -- swirl, sniff, sip and savor -- of tasting wines. Under umbrellas shading town squares, Beck taught me how to get a good crown of foam and practice patience before that first sip of a cool brew, and how to relish the aftertaste of the hops, yeast and malt on the tongue. I expounded on gravity-flow vineyards while she exalted high-gravity beers.

Over aperitifs of a chilled Mosel, steins of Hefeweizen and dinners enhanced with a dry Riesling, we laughed and shared stories. We talked of tastes, preferences and dreams -- hers of a life to come, full of travels and studies and career, mine of a less-stressed life at home. And through that talk, with or without the wine or beer's effects, we journeyed toward a closer bond.

Though fall is the prime time to visit Germany for its harvest, wine and sausage festivals (and, of course, the big beer swill of Oktoberfest), I got a head start during Beck's summer vacation. She invited me to join her because she was supposed to visit with her former roommate, who was finishing a semester abroad at the university in Freiburg. But the roommate got a new boyfriend and dumped her plans with Beck. A break for me.

We rendezvoused at the Basel-Mulhouse Euro Airport at the border of Switzerland and France and across the Rhine from Freiburg. After renting a car, we planned to drive north, roughly following the Rhine through the Baden Valley to Wiesbaden. Farther north in Koblenz, we'd pick up the Mosel and trace it southward through tiny villages with big wine reputations, ending in the city of Trier. Our goal for each day was about 200 miles, which would allow us to see the sites and taste the libations but not dally.

On the first day, we set some rules: minimal churches, museums and big cities. Breakfast by 9 a.m. We'd take turns driving and planning the day's itinerary, and stay wherever the early evening found us. Each night, we'd search for lodging in an area where we could walk to dinner and sightsee the next morning. (As it turned out, we'd look for the big church in the middle of every town, then follow the steeple. Invariably, we'd find a nice room nearby for under $110 or so, including breakfast.)

As far as the drinking went, we'd have wine with dinner or at tastings. During lunch or late afternoon or whenever we'd find ourselves at a biergarten, we'd sample beers. And we'd take turns being the designated driver.

Our first overnight stop set the tone. We walked into the pedestrian section of Speyer, about 120 miles north of the Swiss city of Basel, where we sat on the outdoor terrace of a weinstub, or wine cafe.

I took one look at the menu and knew I was in trouble. My knowledge of German comes from Wayne Newton's "Danke Schoen." But Beck had had two semesters of German, and she had been there for a few weeks. She greeted our waiter, then interpreted the menu for me, ordering the first of many pork chops we'd have on this trip, along with onions and fried potatoes. What to drink? Usually a red with pork, so I suggested the house Spatburgunder, which my wine book said was a pinot noir.

"Prost!" Beck said, as we clinked glasses.

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.

The Beer

Germans take their beer seriously. Since 1516, a purity requirement has been faithfully followed, allowing only water, hops, barley malt and yeast as ingredients. Each town or region has its own breweries, which, like the terroirs of wine, have their own unique taste. And there are a variety of styles of beer to be brewed.

Beck first introduced me to Hefeweizen. We were in Bad Kreuznach, about 20 miles southwest of Wiesbaden, a town whose claim to fame is a centuries-old bridge on which two houses perch. We found a table at an outdoor cafe, where we enjoyed a pizza and the Hefeweizen, a slightly sweet and cloudy beer made from wheat found largely in southern Germany. It's one of Beck's favorites, and I could see why.

The next day, shortly after we passed by the Burg Pfalz -- a tall, white castle standing midstream where "robber knights" demanded tolls from passing traffic on the Rhine in the 14th century -- we stopped for a cold drink in St. Goar, named for the patron saint of pottery. Beck had me try a Pilsener, a light-colored brew made from barley, which gives it a distinct taste of hops. I liked it, although I preferred the yeasty taste of the Hefeweizen from the night before.

Other beer essentials came in spurts. Helles are a lager, light in color, and have more malt sweetness and less hops flavor. I liked the taste of hops more. Bocks and Dunkels are dark, strong and sweet lagers with a higher alcohol content. The darker color is from roasting the malted grain, so there's a definite flavor there. You've got to be in the mood for such a thing -- and hand over the car keys, I discovered.

At Cochem, upriver from Winningen, Beck ordered me a Kristallweizen, a Hefeweizen that has had the yeast filtered out, so it has a cleaner taste and look. I liked it, but I thought the Hefeweizens I tasted earlier had more character.

Not that the afternoon needed more character -- or characters. At a nearby table, a group of young men sang the popular song adopted as the anthem for Germany's soccer team and waved krugs of beer. One man, who was wearing a bright red camisole (stuffed in the right places) and matching lipstick, got up and sang by himself. He swaggered over and posed for a photo in front of me, then looped his arm over Beck's shoulder and posed again. We wondered what kind of bet he had lost.

At our last dinner in Freiburg, Beck had to have a "Hefe" for the road. So did I, which surprised me. Not a wine with my Wiener schnitzel and potatoes, but a beer -- and a specific kind at that. I'd fallen for its foam and yeasty taste.

But then another surprise: Beck queried me on how to make a good, rich sauce for pork chops that would show off a Riesling, a bottle within her student budget. Go figure. Now she wants to learn more about pairing wine and food.

Beth Wiegand is a writer in North Carolina.