Wine Tasting in Kaiserstuhl

Vines as far as the eye can see!

Our wine day started off with a massive win. We pulled into the first place (Salwey Weingut) and it was closed. We poked our noses in the door anyway, and spotted someone who invited us in to try wines. He was such a good guy, and it turned out he'd spent some time working in Blenheim a while back. We asked him about shipping wine to Australia, as even at the first place we're already worrying about getting wine home! Anyway, didn't get any answers on that, but did find out he knows the guys from Stuyvesant's House (restaurant up in Crows Nest), and they were planning on importing some of his wine. Fabulous news for us, as the wine was fantastic! He also showed us the wine cellar which was pretty impressive.

Outside Salwey - yep, that's the cellar door!

Salwey Wine Cellar

The next stop was Albin, where we interrupted them having lunch. We'd had their chardonnay the previous night at dinner, and were looking forward to tasting it again, and maybe buying a bottle, however they were sold out of the previous vintage and the new wasn't bottled yet. The lady was super lovely though, and with her limited English, and our mostly non-existent German we got by and tasted some fabulous wines. The vineyard was entirely organic, and all their power is from solar sources. As an aside, apparently the town of Freiburg generates more solar energy than Britain (classic Germans!).

From there we headed to Dr Herger in yet another beautiful little town for more amazing wines, and even less German. We pulled up to a dinky building in the middle of town to find the door closed, and German signs we couldn't read. Luckily we took a guess and rang the door bell, and got let in. Although they may not have spoken much English, they happily printed out the English tasting notes for each wine we tasted.

Lastly we visited this awesome vineyard up on a hill, which we chanced upon purely as we wanted to drive through all the gorgeous grape laden vines. It was much more commercial, but still good wines, and incredible views.

The entire day we were either driving through apple orchards or vines heavy with grapes, which was lovely to see. Many of our trips through Europe so far have been in winter (for snowboarding) when the vines are bare.

We tried lots of local wines, including graubergundan, spatbergundan, weisserbergundan, reisling, chardonnay and silvaner. Loving the German wines!

Greg driving like a champ!

Vines everywhere

More vines

Taking in the vines

Yet more vines

Vines and the one on the hill

Grapes!