Progress sometimes plays hide and seek.
In the small wine-growing town of Deidesheim, the queen of the Palatinate wine towns, he has fun disappearing behind venerable facades that seem to be carved in stone for all eternity, in the shimmering golden sandstone of Mittelhaardt.
The existence of Deidesheim has been guaranteed since 699, and there has been evidence of viticulture being practiced here since 770, which the Prince-Bishops of Speyer promoted with God's blessing for seven hundred years and whose fruits they preferred to eat personally on the spot in their summer residence - and to those otherwise hosts of Emulate carousing, if more in the spirit of Dionysus than the Lord God.
Except now that the pandemic has driven them out of their Olympus and dried up the fun life in the wine-growing rooms.
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
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The prince-bishop's palace did not survive the war of the Palatinate Succession, but there is still more than enough history: colossal baroque wine-growing farms and the playful villas of the richest wine-growers in the neo-renaissance style;
wrought iron fountains based on the Florentine model and crooked alleys full of fig trees as allusions to the Mediterranean spirit of the Palatinate people;
ancient inns, bent under the weight of half a millennium, and the late Gothic parish church of St. Ulrich with its macabre ossuary and the Ölberg chapel, a foundation of the proud bakers' guild, as evidenced by its coat of arms with pretzel and pointed wedge.
The most self-confident guild people in Deidesheim, however, have always been the winegrowers, who have received lavish gifts from nature: Many, if not most of the best Palatinate locations are around Deidesheim, which could not do anything else than together with its two neighboring villages Wachenheim and Forst to become the residence of the high aristocracy among the Palatinate winemakers, worthy successors of the Speyer prince-bishops. Eight members of the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (VDP) alone house the three locations: Reichsrat von Buhl, Privy Councilor Dr. von Bassermann-Jordan, von Winning and Georg Siben Erben in Deidesheim, Acham-Magin and Georg Mosbacher in Forst, Dr. Bürklin-Wolf and Odinstal in Wachenheim. And not only most of them, but also many lesser-known companies, despite their long tradition,Despite their grave history, they have become the flag bearers of progress in recent years: They have committed themselves to ecology and made Deidesheim the Palatinate epicenter of gentle, nature-respecting, non-harassing viticulture.
Frankfurt green sauce from the vineyard
Kathrin Otte, the young boss of the Mehling family winery, sees herself as the champion of this progressive return. It is hidden - how could it be otherwise in Deidesheim - behind the narrow entrance gate of a five-hundred-year-old square courtyard, which for a long time served as a stagecoach station and could serve as a backdrop in every coat-and-sword film. The estate was founded by Ottes' great-grandfather, who had previously been administrator at Reichsrat von Buhl, and committed himself to natural management from the very beginning. Earlier than most other wineries in the Palatinate, it renounced artificial fertilizers, and at the end of the 1980s it switched to "controlled, environmentally friendly viticulture", as it is called in the less than charming official German. So today Kathrin Otte can look forward to a perfectly healthy,Build a layer of humus that has grown over generations like few other winemakers have in their vineyards.