Buying Wine the German Way - Small Vintners, Big Wines

Drop in and taste a few wines...

While you're at it, check out the warehouse

..Don't forget the vineyard...

Karl Dennhardt packs up your purchases

...While Frau Dennhardt adds up the bill...

No matter which wines you pick, they're going to be fabulous.

I admit having a fondness for the fermented grape.  Lived in Spain, traveled in France, toured the Napa Valley, blah, blah, blah.  I don’t mean the wines were blah, far from it.  I denigrate no wine before it’s time.  Wherever you are with that sweet someone, whether it’s a sun blinded day, or a drizzling time for snuggles, even if you have a two dollar, screw cap from Jimmy Jon’s Bottle Shop and Shoe Repair, it’s going to be a great wine. Warms your heart just thinking about those bygone days, doesn’t it.

In Germany, you can capture them again. Easily.  The big vineyards in the States have polished presentations and showcase tasting rooms, expansive enough to quench the thirst of busloads of tourists.  But also rather impersonal.  Not knocking that either.  Business is business. 

But, in Germany, the big news is the little news.  Up and down the German Weinstraße, there are hundreds of small-scale weinguts, family businesses, with their own hand-tended vineyards, careful wine production, and sales right out of the family homestead.  It’s fun to taste, but even more fun to get to know a little bit about the people who make the wine and sell it and care about it.

I know what you’re thinking.  If there are hundreds of weinguts, how do you go about picking one?  You have some choices.  Just go from one to another, sipping until you can’t remember your wife’s name, or where she left her purse.  Another, slightly less obnoxious method is to order wine in a restaurant and ask the waitress for the name and address of the weingut.  If she also includes her phone number, you’re a very lucky man.  A third way is to simply go to a friend’s house, drink his wine and before he throws your ass out, ask where he got it.  A fourth and probably the most fun you’ll have being clueless, is to get a map of the Weinstrße and plan a few tasting weekends.

In spring through fall, perhaps the best way is to look for winefests.  Chances are great that any wine you taste at a winefest is a local wine….as in down the street.

Don’t like any of those suggestions?  Go pop a top on a Bud and hunch down in front of the tellie for an afternoon of ‘Who Wants to Be A Loser?’

As it happens, we found a wine we liked at a restaurant.  Asked the waitress.  Walked out with a scrap of paper and all the info.  Now comes the best part: We drove there and all our dreams of a romantic wine tasting came true.  I’m using romantic in the way the word was intended. Enjoying.  Comparing.  Chatting about tastes and smells. Meeting lovely people in a cozy atmosphere that made you never want to leave.  In short, sharing a lovely afternoon with your sweet someone, with no worries, and no cares.

Dennhardt winery sits unobtrusively on a side street in Mußbach, a suburb of Neustadt.  Behind the house is a rather large warehouse, that stores wine production machinery, a small tasting room, and over 100,000 bottles of delicious red, white, and rosé wines.  Behind the warehouse stretch acres and acres of manicured vineyards.  The winery is run by Karl Dennhardt and his wife, both in their 80’s, and anything but old.  Cheery, enthusiastic to the point of exuberance, they invited us into the small tasting room and sat with us as we sampled six or seven of the more than fifteen different wines they produce.  Frau Dennhardt shared stories from her childhood to the present.  Neither she nor her husband speak English, but that didn’t seem to slow anyone down.

I forgot to mention, there was also a party going on.  The Dennhardts had a dozen or more friends in their backyard, eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves.  Frau Dennhart told us she’d made a five-kilo bowl of potato salad.  Out behind the warehouse, big chunks of skewered pork roasted over a wood fire and graced us with a heavenly, smokey aroma.

I asked Karl Dennhardt if it was really ok for us to taste right then.  He told me words to the effect of: hey, at least you’re buying wine.  Those folks out there are eating and drinking for free!  He wasn’t wrong about the buying part.  After a leisurely hour, we came home with seventy bottles.  Better than that, we came home with smiles and memories.

Weingut Karl Dennhardt

Brelten Weg 23a

67435 Neustadt-Mußbach

tele:  0632168367