VINES WITH VIEWS

By mid-morning the cobbled lanes of Bernkastel are overtaken by travellers marvelling at the town’s medieval marketplace and gabled half-timbered houses. The scene is so chocolate-box, so fairytale, it might have been the setting for the Brothers Grimm fantasy about a couple of naughty kids and a cannibalistic witch. The weinstuben (wine taverns) are full, the strudel shops busy. Just a short, steep walk from the selfie-snappers lining up at the 17th-century town hall, however, and not far from the remains of the Graach Gate, built in 1300, is a little vineyard unnoticed by the crowd below. I pick an alley and climb to a narrow road flanked by a high stone terrace. Butterflies flit, birds sing, and the sun shines on the most valuable vines in Germany, a vertiginous south-west slope of Mosel Valley riesling with roots deep in sharp blue Devonian slate.

This is the Bernkasteler Doctor, a mere 3.26 hectares of rock and vine – ungrafted, some planted a century ago. It’s hard to imagine