Journey: Rothenburg ob der Tauber to Bernkastel-Kues, Germany
Distance: 320 km
Campsite for the night: MoselCamping
YouTube link: Day 24

Emma enjoyed the speed limit free autobahn today — until she was overtaken by a couple of sports cars that must have easily been doing 170 or 180 kph and we were very buffeted. She then moved back into the inside lane and drove a lot more sedately (although still over the 130 kph advisory limit, because the roads were really fast).

One peculiarity of both Austrian and Germany motorway services is you have to pay to use the toilets, but you get a voucher for the same amount, which you can then use in the shop. Probably a good tactic to make you spend money at the services (rather than just a penny!) but still a little strange.

After our super quick drive on the autobahn, we arrived at our campsite in the Mosel valley at just gone one, giving us plenty of time to get set up, have lunch and get to the wine tasting. However, the campsite shut for two hours at lunch, so we ended up parking the van at a very rakish angle while we waited, which made making lunch quite tricky!

We left the van parked outside reception and wandered down to the wine tasting, giving us our first proper view of the Moselle river and the steep vineyards. It really is impressive just how steep the slopes are and how many vines are planted.

The winery we (Emma) had chosen was set back slightly from the river and was quite small and unassuming. However, looks are deceiving because S.A Prüm is actually a very well known winery and is one of the top producers in the Mosel.

The lady running the tastings was none other than the owner — Saskia Andrea Prüm — who gave her name to the winery. She had two groups - German speakers and English speakers — and was running separate tastings in parallel according to the preferences of each group. We were with a French Canadian woman who was very entertaining as well as being a really wine lover. We chatted about the different wine regions we’d visited, differences between the UK and Canada, the unspeakable problem to the south of their border and her quest to find a European husband so she could move.

Our tasting was all about dry Rieslings of different qualities and ages, with each wine getting better than the one before. By the end we were trying Grosses Gewächs (GG) wines, which are equivalent to the Grand Crus of France. Needless to say, we left with six bottles and lugged our box of wine back up the steep hill to our van. We quickly checked in and set up the van before heading out on our bikes to dinner.

By this point, the rain had set in so it was quite a miserable cycle, but little did we know, it was the highlight of our evening…

We’d found a vegan hotel online a few months before with two different restaurants, one a more casual affair and one that served a 3, 4, 5 or 7 course tasting menu. The whole website was unfathomable, partly because it was in German and partly because it gave nothing away. Anyway, we’d kept coming back to this website trying to figure it out and it was the presence of this vegan hotel and restaurants that had determined where we wanted to stay in the Mosel. A few days before, I had braved phoning the restaurant to make a reservation and encountered a peculiar fellow, who we later learnt was the chef and the sole English speaker.

When we got there, we were shown to a little cute nook off the main dining room. The whole place was quite old fashioned, which we’d expected really given the more rural bits of Germany often are. The service ranged from slightly interested in us to grunting, and mostly in German to add to the lack of understanding. The food sadly ranged from ok to inedible and we were very pleased when the meal was done. We could hear the chef making his rounds and were desperate to pay before he got to us. Unfortunately that didn’t happen and we had to endure the peculiar fellow making small talk. He wasn’t really interested in what we thought of the food and when we didn’t shower him with praise of his innovative food, he talked of other things. All in all, it was a horrible meal and I now know why they keep the website so vague. When we got back to the van, we both checked the reviews again and puzzled how they were so good.

If you find yourself in the Mosel and are looking for vegan food (or in fact any food), make sure you avoid Hotel Nicolay 1881.