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The northerly winemaking regions of Germany straddle the 50th parallel and are amongst the world’s coolest vineyards.
Nonetheless, vine cultivation dates to the ancient world—wild vines had been growing on the upper Rhine previously, but Vitis vinifera arrived in Germany with the Romans. Near the end of the 3rd century, Emperor Probus overturned Domitian’s 92 CE ban on new vineyard plantings, and viticulture followed the Romans into provinces north of the Alps. By the fourth century winemaking was definitively established along the steep slopes of the Mosel River. Charlemagne, the legendary beard-stained lover of wine—whose newly minted Carolingian calendar replaced the Roman October with Windume-Manoth, “the month of the vintage”—introduced vine cultivation east of the Rhine River in the late eighth century. During the Middle Ages, the Church was instrumental in shepherding the development of vineyards, and many of Germany’s modern einzellagen (vineyards) owe their nomenclature to monastic influence. As in France, the Church essentially operated its own feudal economy: it collected a tithe, or tax, from the parishioners who worked the vineyards, and wine made a suitable substitute for cash. The Cistercians of Burgundy founded the famous Kloster Eberbach monastery in the Rheingau in 1136, where they amassed the largest vineyard holdings in Europe by the end of the Middle Ages, with over 700 acres of vines. The walled Steinberg vineyard, an ortsteil within the commune of Hattenheim, was the monks’ centerpiece and remains wholly intact today—an alleinbesitz (monopole) of Kloster Eberbach for over eight centuries