To get to what is probably the steepest vineyard in the Palatinate, you just have to orientate yourself towards the Palatinate Forest.

Anyone who approaches the northern tip of the low mountain range has almost reached the goal.

Coming from the east, visitors cross a beautiful landscape with rolling hills, on which many winemakers have distributed their vines for decades.

Two of them are the brothers Johannes and Philipp Reibold, who a few years ago took over the winery of the same name from their father in Freinsheim and put it on the road to success.

Marco Dettweiler

Editor in business.

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Wherever wine is made, people like to drink it - at least in the Palatinate.

That is why Marc Depper, a good friend of the Reibolds, bought the "Alte Kellerei" in Neuleiningen near Grünstadt together with his wife Franziska Willersinn and her family in July 2020 to use it as a wine café with a spacious garden, guest rooms and a vaulted cellar for special occasions and Celebrate.

A steep, overgrown slope facing south also belongs to the property.

At first glance it cannot be seen from there, especially not from the guests, because they are sitting in the garden and drinking wine, above all enjoying the view.

Now it was clear what had to come if one friend actually bought a steep slope by chance and the other knew that wonderful wine could grow on it. So at the beginning of the year the Reibolds leased the piece of land with a gradient of 68 percent (34 degrees), which at the beginning of this year was still a wild, bushy and forgotten slope and is now being admired as an ambitious project by more and more colleagues. Only if you lean over the boundary wall of the property and look specifically downwards will you discover the plants that grow up on steel poles. Plant lovers can tell from the leaves that it has to be wine, while professionals know from the shape of the leaves that it is Chardonnay.

Even the winemakers from the Moselle should pay tribute to the “Am Mühlberg” location here in Neuleiningen. Even if their vines, in contrast to those in the Palatinate, are almost always on an extreme slope. With the Bremmer Calmont, the Moselans even have the steepest location in Europe.

Before the friends could get to work outside to whip up the overgrown slope, they started to work up a sweat in their minds. Because in this country nobody is allowed to simply create a vineyard. In November 2020, the team went to the Rhineland-Palatinate Chamber of Agriculture in Neustadt to inquire whether the parcel existed in the viticulture register. The sobering answer came: No, it doesn't. In Germany this means that the wine may only be sold in the lowest quality level "German wine", if at all.

The nature conservation authority must approve the recultivation of the slope to the Wingert.

Because the Reibolds are organic vintners and also knew how to convince the whole team, they did so in January of this year.

A month later the decision came that “German wine” could be grown on the Mühlberg.

But that was not the end of the plant stem, but recultivation could begin.

With hot tea and chainsaws

It was cold, very cold, at the beginning of February this year in the Palatinate. Recultivation sounds like delicate finger exercises on the plants, but it was hard work with crude machines. On some days the thermometer dropped to minus nine degrees Celsius. Franziska Willersinn provided her husband and the Reibolds with hot tea, while the men first moved on the trees and bushes with chainsaws. But not all surrendered.

So a winch was needed to pull out the particularly stubborn trees.

Above all, the roots had to disappear from the ground, just cutting down the tree with a chainsaw was not enough.

Then the young people from Palatinate created small terraces by setting stones and building stairs in the slope, which is criss-crossed with red sandstone.

Anyone who stands here as a visitor in the middle of the vineyard, with one leg up and the other underneath, to listen to the wine enthusiast, quickly realizes what hard work clearing these 750 square meters must have been.