Bread, Sausage and Wine!
Its wine festival time in Europe. Every weekend from mid-September until mid- October the wine is flowing to rousing music in the picturesque medieval winegrowing villages and towns along the banks of the Rhine, Main, the Moselle and the Danube from Germany through Austria, Bohemia, (now the Czech Republic), Slovakia and Hungary, as the wine growing regions celebrate Bacchus and the forthcoming grape harvest. In French Alsace and Provence, villages vie with each other in their celebration of harvest and wine.
Granddaddy, and largest of all the wine festivals, is the nine day carouse known as the Wurstmarkt that has taken place for centuries each year at the health resort Bad Duerkheim in Germany's Rheinland Pfalz. It ends this year on 19 September.
This is the 570th year they have celebrated the admirable wine from this area, where vines were first planted in Roman times. The Duerkheim Festival first emerged as a tinker's fair coinciding with a mediaeval pilgrimage to a 12th century chapel to St. Michael there on 29 September, his Saint's Day. If has altered, grown and lengthened over the centuries, from a one-day fair selling pots and crocks, to today's oddly named 'Sausage Market', the world's largest wine festival spanning two weekends.
This year, if you are robust enough to rise to the challenge, you can sample no less than 176 White , 34 Rosé, 43 Red and 21 Sparkling wines offered by local vintners in the 50 different booths and tented halls within the festival's wine village while enjoying some rumbustious oom-pa-pa music played with vigour upon trumpet, horn and drum. And, of course, you can, (and should), eat plenty of the inevitable German sausages, which have given the festival its name, to line your stomach for the incoming 264 samples!
Exhibiting vintners, who must have local vineyards, may only show wines for sampling which have been given the official German seal of quality, which range upward in price and general natural sweetness from Qualitaetswein through Kabinett, Spaetlese, Auslese, to Trockenbeerenauslese, Beerenauslese and the rarely made and much prized nectar Eiswein.
While German white wines from the Rhineland and Mosel have for centuries been known and appreciated outside the country, (Shakespeare frequently refers to quaffing a Rhenish wine), little seems to have been done to promote the German reds. This is a pity as Duerkheim in particular produces a magnificent robust red, the Duerkheimer Feuerberg which compares most favourably with a good Burgundy for body, nose and palate. It was my red wine of choice when I lived in nearby Mannheim, but I do not see it on British wine lists. Maybe the locals drink the lot - and who can blame them!
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