To Germany!

I'm working on catching up, everybody.

The past week and a half with Oliver and Nina has been both incredibly relaxing and incredibly busy. First, our trip from Prague to Mainz.

We hopped the train to Mainz via Dresden and everything went relatively without a hitch. Because I knew that Jay wanted to work on the train, I'd opted for first class to ensure that he'd have room to work and wi-fi. Nothing in it for me. Not at all. I don't know what you're talking about.

The first train to Dresden went off without a hitch. We got in, found a waiting room, and hung around till it was time to go get our train. On the screens we noticed one phrase repeating under our train. I ran it through Google translate, and all it gave me was "Train  today dropped off." In retrospect we understand what this means, but it was just this little yellow script rolling under our train number. We still had a departure time and a platform, so we figured we were fine. Turns out, our train wasn't coming, so we sat in the Dresden train station for a solid hour when we could have been working out an alternative. Oh well. Finally, while sitting at our supposed platform, we saw a bunch of people hurriedly grab up their stuff and leave the platform following an announcement. Jay and I have no idea what's going on and no chance of understanding German, so we start talking, loudly, in English, about what's going on and what should we do and what are we missing? Until finally and English speaker sitting next to us took pity and explained that the train wasn't coming. So we went to the information desk. The woman we went to spoke absolutely no English, but I looked at her pathetically and said "Mainz?" and showed her our ticket. She babbled at me in German for a few minutes, pointing to things on the ticket and finally printed out a new itinerary for us that involved a short stopover in Leibnitz. After a little more babbling she put a stamp on our ticket that excused us from the "non exchangeable" restriction on our ticket. We caught the next train to Leibnitz and confirmed that we were still on the right path. We found wi-fi in a coffee shop so we could let Oliver know what was going on. Eventually we got on the train to Mainz, which was only slightly confusing, because, apparently, in Frankfurt, the train was going to split in two, one direction going to Mainz, one going elsewhere, and we had no idea if we were on the right half. A nice German man told us he "thought" we were on the right half right before he got off the train. He was right, thankfully.

Finally we got off the train in Mainz to the warm and welcoming open arms of Oliver, who gave us a late night tour of Mainz as we drove to Oliver's home town of Nachenheim. Then we sat with Oliver and his mother and ate meat and drank wine. It was wonderful. Oliver's mother lives in a converted barn that Oliver's father did most of the work on himself over the course of 8 years (he worked for an architecture firm, so the man knew a thing or two about construction and design). It's a beautiful and intriguing home. Jay and I slept directly under the peak of the roof in a lofted bed. With the window open and a light breeze, it was very pleasant.

The next morning Nina had joined us by the time I woke up (Oliver picked her up at the airport earlier that morning). After the boys got some work done, we walked up into the vineyards above Nachenheim. It was a brutally hot and sunny day, so we didn't last long, but we had some beautiful views of the Rhine. After that we piled into Oliver's mom's car and journeyed to Trier and the Mosel! When we got to Trier, Oliver dropped the rest of us downtown. We walked through the Porta Negra, and the Trier Cathedral, which claims to be the oldest church in Europe, as its foundations date back to Constantine. Some of the roman walls are still present. 

A slightly lopsided shot of the old basilica in Trier

It was a beautiful old church. Off to the side is one of the first gothic chapels in Europe, with some lovely paintings and stained glass. The stained glass looked very different to me, than anything I'd seen, so Nina asked the old man who worked in the church about them. He told us (with Nina translating) that the original windows had been destroyed in the war (though they were so old that the light wouldn't shine through them anymore), but the chapel had served as a French soldiers chapel, so after the war (if I'm remembering this correctly) the French government replaced the glass in the chapel. It's beautiful glass, but you can tell its in a modern style. There are twelve pillars in the chapel, each with a painting of one of the apostles, and there is one place in the entire church where you can stand and see all of them, denoted by a star in the floor. It pays to talk to old men in churches. He was very kind.

After that we stopped at a nearby winebar and shared a few glasses of a delicious Golftropfchen Mosel Reisling. We bought the bottle so that Jay and I could take it home and drink it with dinner that night. After that we headed to Konplatt, which is Nina's favorite jewelry store. She was itching to stock up on some of their earrings, and I was interested to see the store, so we went in. Lots of sparklies. Lots and LOTS of sparklies. And in interesting colors and shapes. Once Jay saw the prices (incredibly reasonable) he thought "Sarah's gonna leave here with a piece of jewelry." He was right. I found a pair that I just kept drifting back to, but I needed his encouragement in order to bite the bullet and buy them. He gave it, I bought them, and now I have a new beautiful pair of earrings. A quick stop at the gourmet gummy bear shop, and we rejoined Oliver. We returned to the house of his friend Helge, who is currently in South Africa but was kind enough to let us all crash there. Oliver and Nina had plans to meet up with old friends that night. Because the old friends don't speak English, we all agreed that it was best that Jay and I do our own thing, which we were quite happy with. We stopped at the grocery store, planned out a nice dinner, and had a quite night in (finished off with the rest of the Goldtropfchen reisling, translates as little drops of gold, I believe. Accurate).

It was pretty hot in Trier that night, so we slept with all the windows open and a cool breeze drifting through the house.

The next morning Oliver had an appointment with Rudy at Dr. Hermann in the Mosel. We've had many of their wines before. Rudy was the winemaker in years past. His son Christian took over (3-5) years ago and is apparently something of a wine making prodigy, as well as a talented businessman, because the winery has rapidly risen in the ranks and grown in production. Rudy spoke excellent English and was kind enough to tell most of his stories in that language so that we could understand him. Particularly entertaining was that one of the fluorescent lightbulbs in the warehouse was on its last leg and kept flickering. About every 10 minutes, frequently in the middle of a sentence, Rudy would stop, glare and the light and make an angry/disgusted growl that has us all laughing. 

The wines at Dr. Hermann

After purchasing a fair complement of wines, we drove to the base of one of the nearby hills and walked up to the Urziger Wurzgarten. When you are driving on the Mosel you see it and think "yes that's hilly" but you just don't realize how steep it is until you've climbed one of the hills and looked down. The fact that they manage to grown grapes on these hills and maintain the vines, and harvest carefully is prove of human ingenuity and sheer stubborness. But vines that have to work hard produce amazing wines, so they're doing something right!

This really doesn't manage to show you how steep this thing is. 

Many of the vineyards are marked by signs. The microclimates in the Mosel wine region are so varied that you can get huge variations in the grapes produced from different hills, or even from different parts of the same hill, so EVERYTHING is named. 

The climb was worth the view

After the hike in the Wurzgarten, which is a frickin heat sink, we gasped our way to a gas station and bought water. I think we each downed about 1.5 liters in the next five minutes. Then we headed to a vintage release party at Immich-Batterieburg. The winemaker also had 3 guest winemakers there presenting their wines. One was from the Rheingau, one from a tiny wine region in northern Italy, and one from Rioja. The Rheingau wines were nothing special, though it was cool to try a reisling, which is a reddish grape that is the mother varietal to Reisling and is only grown in Rheingau. The Italian wines were (typically) too harsh for me, but everyone else loved them. The Rioja wines were not typical Rioja's, but they were Spanish, and that's all I really need. Of course, Oliver could have gone without the Spanish wines. The Mosel Reislings (the host winemaker) were all very dry but okay. One problem was that he had only bottled the wines a week ago, and for the first week to two weeks after bottling wines go through a period where they're "bottle sick," and they need some time to settle before you can really start to taste them and their potential. We cannot figure out what he was thinking, having his vintage release presentation only a week after bottling, but it was a shame. It would have been nice to try the wines when they were better able to shine.

After the vintage release we headed to the home of a winemaker and old friend of Oliver's Mattias, who is the winemaker at Meierer. We've had his wines before as well, and they're all very nice and ridiculously affordable. These are the kinds of wines that make Oliver angry about how expensive wine is in the United States, and I don't blame him. If I could drink a bottle of wine like that for $5, I'd be pretty exasperated by the likes of Barefoot and Cupcake as well. Mattias and his wife Sabrina were charming and we had a wonderful time. Also, Sabrina went to some extra trouble to make sure that I was able to eat safely, which I was incredibly grateful for. Finally Oliver, who was driving and getting pretty tired, called it a night, and we headed back to Trier. We needed to get our rest, because the next day was the Saar Riesling Summer….