Morning fog at Hotel Traube
Tonbach, in the Black Forest.
Grapes ripening in the sunshine
at Weingut Wöhrle, in Lahr.
Setting a table at
Schwarzwaldstube, a
Michelin three-starred
restaurant at Hotel
Traube Tonbach.
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as a footpath; we passed a bald guy on an electric
unicycle, a teen couple playing badminton,
several old ladies with walking sticks, and a group
of local high school girls snacking on grapes
they were plucking from the vines. I asked Wöhrle
if he minded, and he shrugged with indifference.
“The vineyard is right in town, so people
think of it as their own.”
From the slope we looked out over a glinting
sea of what turned out to be windshields at
a huge Fiat plant. “For us, it’s actually good,”
he said. “The car tops are so hot that they
create an updraft. It makes the clouds rise and
separate, so the rain misses our vineyard.
It wasn’t always that way.”
Whether thousands of hot car roofs count as
terroir, I do not know, but it does seem inarguable
that Pinot Noir vineyards in Baden, and in
Germany as a whole, have benefited from the
rise in overall temperatures over the past 30
or 40 years. Even so, this is still a cool region.
Effectively, it’s a valley, lying between France’s
Vosges Mountains of Alsace and the Rhine River
to the west and the Black Forest to the east.
Cold evening winds from the forest flow down
and cool the vineyards in the mornings, which,
says Hans-Bert Espe of Shelter Winery, “creates
nice, elegant wines.”
Shelter, which Espe runs with his viticulturist
wife, Silke Wolf, is about a 20-minute drive south
of Wöhrle, just outside the little town of Kenzingen.
The couple named the winery after a concrete
air-raid shelter built for (even more) Canadian
troops, where they got started. “In the next shelter
over was a Hell’s Angels motorcycle club,” Espehe told me. “The new generation—which includes
my wife and me—tend to make this brighter,
more elegant style of Pinot.” We were tasting
his 2016 Lahrer Kirchgasse Spätburgunder
Grosse Gewachs. Its tongue-twistingly guttural
name belied its wild raspberry aromas
and seductive character.
Wöhrle’s winery is in the center of Lahr, which,
until 1999, was home to a Canadian military base
and about 10,000 soldiers. The barracks are now
largely occupied by Russian and Eastern European
immigrants, most of whom work in the auto
industry. But central Lahr’s industrial aspect faded
quickly as we headed up the domelike hill where
Wöhrle’s vineyards lie. The narrow road doubled