Please tell me your favorite town/village, winery, restaurant, or attraction in any of these regions. Looking for some inspiration. Thanks

Bingen is the large obvious place. Not bad.

Rudesheim is the main draw in Rheigau, if you can get by tat there is a good walk, take the cable car (low level) up to the top and then walk down to Assmannshausen and either walk back to Rudesheim or catch the train. Good walking, nice vinyards and forests.

The wines are some of the best in the area, but for me Riesling only comes into its own after at least 5 years, so if you want to try the good stuff, look out in restuarants/bars for the sweet wine section and you can often pick up a glass of say 2003 for E2 which is worth so much more.

Bacharach!

Oberwesel is a charming little town.

You see already from the posts that there are many nice little towns.

One the main attractions is the Marksburg in Braubach near Koblenz - an authentic medieval castle.

The main attraction is the river gorge with many ruins of castles, vinyards, villages etc. You have to explore the valley by boat, by car, by train or by bicycle.

Thanks everyone.

I have been to this region before, but it's been a few years. Marksburg is a place I missed, so I plan to visit there. I enjoyed Oberwesel and will likely return. Any other charming places like Oberwesel I may have missed?

Rudesheim is nice but it is tour bus central - whenever I've been there very crowded with bus tours who stay there - not your more sedate town like Bacharach or Boppard.

Hopefully fussganger will see this as he/she is a wealth of great info on the Rhine area. Check his postings for lots of good ones on the Rhine area.

Rüdesheim is the worst tourist trap in the whole area and best avoided.

For the Middle Rhine Gorge, the best source of information is www.welterbe-mittelrheintal.de (click "international" to change to English). A lot has been written about the Rhine gorge, so I don't have to repeat it.

The Rheingau's top attraction is surely Eberbach abbey. Then Johannisberg palace and the old wine villages/towns of Elville, Kiedrich, Oestrich-Winkel.

Rheinhessen is not much of a tourist region (I lived there for one year). The landscape is not that interesting, it is rolling hills covered in vineyards to the horizon, and most villages don't have too much flair either. Oppenheim with its gothic church could be an interesting stop. Wines are worth sampling, though, and you will win everybody's heart if you are able to say. Rhoihessewoiwollemerwennsewissewollewasmerwolle ;-)

The Nahe valley or Palatine (Pfalz) would make a more appealing destination landscape-wise.

The good wines from these areas are, by the way, dry, fruity, fresh - not sweet. We export the sweet stuff to the US and we know why we send it away...

"The good wines from these areas are, by the way, dry, fruity, fresh" - agreed

"- not sweet. " nonsense

What is worth saying is that Riesling goes through a transformation when stored whether dry or sweet. The young wines can be like stored sunshine as above, but can also be too tart and tasteless, you just have to be careful in your selection, I find that you need Spatelese or Auslase on the bottle at least to ensure there is sufficent value in the wine, avoid any wine at a lower level unless you get a free tasting first.

Riesling, as it ages then moves quickly towards a completely different flavour, often reminds me of a nose of benzene or garage floors, with greater complexity and length, to get these in most restaurants or bars you need to be going back at least 5 years while 10 would be great. They do exist, but normally only the sweet ones are cheap enough to buy sensibly, hence quokka makes a good point (though a bit the wrong way around) sweet wines are less popular than they used to be as Germans now grow up with the view that "sweet is bad, dry is good", probably true in food but not in wine.

Rheingau is the best for steely Riesling but the prices reflect that, Nahe is a good option as are Mosel, Pfalz etc.

I've not mentioned Pinot Blanc or Gris, I would but why not go to Alsace (still on the Rhine, just a bit more south) where these grapes are exceptional rather than just good.

What you may not know is that Germany has some fantastic bike paths, and all wine regions are criss-crossed with the things or they follow the river banks, so you can hire bikes by the hour or the week to explore little towns, eat onion cake or just drink wine. Since the rivers run generally down hill and are followed by trains (on which you may take bikes) you will find these areas a good place for a bike holiday.


This might interest http://www.mybikeguide.co.uk/Mosel_Guide.php just for a flavour of such a trip.



You will also find that many wines are in the lower alcohol level so 11% down to 7% is not unknown, obviously the lower levels will be more likely to be sweet (Chemisty 101) so if unsure about what you area about to drink check the % figure.

I prefer the Mosel to Rhine and I like the Pfalz a lot (though its landscape is basically flat with one line of small hills at the edge so hard to image a less appealing landscape unless you are on a bike (which we often are).

wanderfrau writes, "I have been to this region before, but it's been a few years. Marksburg is a place I missed, so I plan to visit there. I enjoyed Oberwesel and will likely return. Any other charming places like Oberwesel I may have missed?"

When you visit Marksburg, leave some time for Braubach.

http://djtravel.homestead.com/files/...hotel_1610.jpg
http://www.romantischer-rhein.de/upl...ltstadt_02.jpg
Zum Weissen Schwanen - http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restauran...alatinate.html
Zum Goldenen Schlüssel (traditional German) - http://www.bensbauernhof.com/bb2005b...schulussel.jpg

When in Oberwesel, channel the "wander" part of your identity and hike up through the Oelsteig vineyards and the Günderodehaus - the setting for a much-loved German TV series called "Heimat" and a good place for a glass of wine with a view.

http://www.gastlandschaften.de/filea...f41b775895.jpg
http://www.christiane-geldmacher.de/...in2014-003.jpg

Boppard (north of Oberwesel) is a fine town with handsome buildings and a nice river promenade, not to mention its chairlift with the nearby 4-lakes viewpoint (Vierseenblick.)

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2769/4...c5c8b305_o.jpg
http://www.pizza-toni-boppard.de/upl...r/IMG_0131.JPG
http://home.kpn.nl/JLKampen1961/alb/...%20Boppard.jpg
http://www.boppard-tourismus.de/45-1-Sessellift.html
Gedeonseck (Gedeon's Corner)terrace, a short walk fromt he top of the chairlift on the path to the Vierseenblick: http://ext.pimg.tw/samlucky5711/1379...g?v=1379089585

Bilbo, what are you writing on riesling? Do you made your experiences with riesling in England in the last century?

You are right that rieslings vary a lot - due to the multitude of individual vinyards with different soil and different angle to the sun and all the little wineries.

You are also right that you can get rieslings which are sweet, semi-sweet ("feinherb") or dry. You have to read the labels or, in restaurants, the menus to learn whether a wine is dry ("trocken"), semi-sweet ("feinherb") or sweet (it is sweet if there is no other specification).

Together with a meal we usually drink dry wines, but a sweet riesling might be an excellent partner of a dessert or a foie gras.

When it comes to wine, there is a close correlation of quality and price. Anything under 6 Euros per bottle is questionable but for 6 Euros you usually get solid quality. Some large and well-known wineries are always reliable - they would never spoil their reputation.

E.g., Kloster Eberbach produces good rieslings, and I agree that this very old monastery is a major attraction in the Middle Rhine Valley. Also, "Schloss Johannisberg“ and „Schloss Vollrads" are very good. But you find many young winemakers who successfully produce excellent qualities, like Dr Randolf Kauer or the Jost family in Bacharach.

traveller, i suffer from too much education in the subject but I just checked my cellar and certainly from 2012 and forward my wines are less than 50% labeled down the trocken/feinherb/sweet root (actually I've never seen a "sweet" wine in Germany), nor indeed did at least two wine makers on the Mosel really know what "feinherb" means in 2014, which is lucky as the term lacks a clear definition.

Still just checked latest wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...classification

I look forward to seeing the new 2014 regulation labels, but I suspect they will be slow to arrive. which reminds me to plan a trip there in 2016

"Feinherb" is quite new - it replaces "halbtrocken" which was used formerly.

"Edelsüß" is mostly used for very sweet, full-bodied dessert wines. Sweetish wines are described as "lieblich", "mild" or "fruchtig". If you want a dry wine there must be "trocken" on the label, otherwise it is sweet.

For an example of wine labelings see here:

https://www.weingut-kloster-eberbach...r-literflasche

(actually I've never seen a "sweet" wine in Germany)>

Have you tried the Mosel Ice Wines?

Yes P I have a whole rack of the things in my cellar, but the word "sweet" is not on any of them

In fact I like the things so I much I actually ran a business selling only sweet wines for 2 years and brought both German and French wines into the UK.

Liebfraumilch was a rage in the States in the 70s - and was known as a sweet wine girls would love to drink - but I guess sweetness is subjective - I think of most Mosel wines as sweet - compared to say French or Italian wines - except Lambrusco which seems very sweet.

fussganger- thanks for your insight

quokka - I agree about Rüdesheim. I will practice saying
Rhoihessewoiwollemerwennsewissewollewasmerwolle. I don't think will try to learn to spell it.

traveller - I enjoy a halbtrocken Reisling, or at least I used to. Thanks for adding a new word to my wine vocabulary

Please learn to spell "Riesling" first;-)

good idea to start with the small words first