Yesterday I returned from a four-day wine tour through Rheinhessen. Today, Carl Zuckmayer's memoirs "Als wär's ein Stück von mir" are on my desk. Inspired by the wine village of Nackenheim - the writer's birthplace - I look in my library for "Fröhlicher Weinberg", the stage play in which winegrowers, boatmen and petty bourgeois are portrayed in a socially critical way. I don't find the book, but I leaf through the author's biography, which he wrote in 1966, ten years before his death. There I find a beautiful description of what I encountered, experienced and felt intensely for four days in a region I knew little about: a memorable landscape with many vines.
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| On the road in Rheinhessen - through green meadows and hills covered with vines |
The area shows an extremely simple, sober character in its strong, sunny fertility. The vines stand neat and well-behaved, the fruit trees arranged in rows, all the land is farmland, and only the reddish skin sheen of the earth betrays something of its secret hot-bloodedness, of its chastened temperament." Yes, it is precisely this landscape that has fascinated me, although, as Carl Zuckmayer writes, it has remained "serene and undemanding" in the face of historical agitation for centuries. As a wine lover, one hardly travels to a wine region because of the landscape, but rather to get to know the wines and winegrowers, to visit wineries, to enjoy wine in authentic places. For this reason, we too travelled to Rheinhessen, took our rooms in the "Himmelacker" of the Storr winery in Dautenheim and visited five of the most famous wineries in the area.