The Moselle Cycle Route. Mike Wells
(€3 in Germany). Rooms vary from single-sex dormitories to family rooms of two to six beds. Unlike British hostels, most continental European hostels do not have self-catering facilities but do provide good-value hot meals. Hostels can get very busy, particularly during school holidays, and booking is advised through www.hihostels.com.
Camping
If you are prepared to carry camping equipment this may appear the cheapest way of cycling the Moselle. However, good-quality campsites with all facilities are often only a little cheaper than B&Bs or hostels. The stage descriptions identify many official campsites, but the list is by no means exhaustive. Camping may be possible in other locations with the permission of local landowners.
Food and drink
Where to eat
There are thousands of places where cyclists can eat and drink, varying from snack bars, hotdog stands and local inns to Michelin-starred restaurants. The locations of many places to eat are identified in the stage descriptions below, but the list is by no means exhaustive. Days and opening times vary. Try to be flexible when planning your day, as a number of inns and small restaurants do not open at lunchtime and may observe one day a week, known in German as ruhetag, on which they remain closed. A local inn offering food and drink is typically known as auberge in France and gaststätte in Germany. A weinstube is a winebar, often attached to a vineyard. Some restaurants in big cities and tourist areas may have English-language menus, but these are less common in smaller towns and rural locations.
When to eat
Breakfast in France is usually continental: breads, jam and a hot drink; in Germany it is the same but with the addition of cold meats, cheese and a boiled egg. In Germany lunch was traditionally the main meal of the day, but this is slowly changing, and a large lunch is unlikely to prove suitable if you plan an afternoon in the saddle. The most common lunchtime snacks everywhere are soups or sandwiches. In France croque monsieur (toasted ham and cheese sandwich) and quiche Lorraine are widely available, while in Germany wurst mit senf und brot (sausages with mustard and bread) and wurst salat (thin strips of slicing sausage served with sauerkraut – pickled cabbage) are popular.
For dinner, a wide variety of cuisine is available. In France cooking is treated almost as a religion, with even the smallest restaurant offering a variety of good-quality dishes cooked on the premises, often using locally sourced ingredients. German cuisine is less varied, but quality is always good and portions are generally large. There are many restaurants offering other options including Italian, Greek, Turkish and Chinese. Much of what is available is pan-European and will be easily recognisable. There are, however, national and regional dishes you may wish to try.
Quiche Lorraine
What to eat
In France the route is entirely in Lorraine, which has a typically French cuisine with some Alsatian and German influences. This includes the popular Alsatian dish of choucroute garnie, a dish of various cuts of pork meat and sausages served with sauerkraut heated in white wine. A typical light meal is tarte flambée or flammekueche, a thin pizza-style base covered with white cheese, onions and bacon and cooked in a wood oven. The most famous local speciality is quiche Lorraine, an open savoury tart filled with egg, cream and bacon. French patisseries (cake shops) offer a mouth-watering selection of cakes and pastries including local specialities like macaroons from Nancy and madeleines. Mirabelles are small golden plums, harvested in August and used to make both fruit tarts and a strong fruit brandy.
Germany is the land of the schwein (pig) and pork, gammon, bacon and ham dishes dominate German menus. Traditionally, pork was pot-roasted or grilled rather than fried. There are over 1500 types of German wurst (sausage), the most common being bratwurst (made from minced pork and served grilled or fried), wienerwurst (smoked sausages served boiled, known as frankfurters in English) and blutwurst (blood sausage). Sauerbraten is marinated roast beef, while fleischkaese and leberkaese are kinds of meat loaf. Forelle (trout) and lachs (salmon) are the most popular fish. The most common vegetable accompaniments are sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. Reibekuchen are potato pancakes, served with apple sauce. Spargel (white asparagus) is consumed in huge quantities during Spargelzeit (asparagus season), between mid-April and 24 June. Germans tend to eat kuchen (cakes) in mid-morning or mid-afternoon and as a result desserts offered with main meals are rather limited, often to just apple strudel or ice cream.
Wine
The Moselle gorge, together with its close neighbours Ruwer and Saar, is one of Germany’s major wine-producing regions. The vineyards of the German wine-producing gebiet (region) of Mosel (formally known as Mosel-Saar-Ruwer) lie almost as far north as grapes can be persuaded to ripen. Vines, planted on steep, slatey slopes, grow on land unfit for normal agriculture. But despite these conditions they are capable of producing some of Germany’s finest white wines. This is made possible by a favourable combination of terroir (ground conditions), climate, grape variety and production methods. The vines send roots deep down into the hillside, drawing upon constant supplies of mineral-rich water from far below the surface. South-facing slopes are favoured, where direct sunlight is enhanced by light reflected from the river. Slatey surfaces store the heat of the day, encouraging ripening and deterring early frosts.
A glass of local Riesling at Piesport (Stage 11)
The grape most suited to these conditions is the Riesling, which is planted on all the most favourable slopes and produces all the finest wines. At its best, Mosel Riesling can compete with the great wines of the world. Despite having a lower alcohol content, the natural balance between dry slatey acidity and fruitiness gives a flavour that can compete with other fuller-bodied wines. But the price of quality is limited quantity. Riesling is a low-yielding grape compared to Müller-Thurgau, a grape that is equally at home in the conditions but produces a lower-quality wine. Secondary slopes and flat land by the river are mostly planted with this grape. This has had an adverse effect upon worldwide perception of Mosel wine, and German wine in general. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Piesport. Here the great south-facing slope of Goldtröpfchen, which rises behind the village and is planted exclusively with Riesling, produces Piesporter, one of the region’s best wines. Opposite, on a flat bend in the river around Michelsberg, there are extensive vineyards of Müller-Thurgau, which produce large quantities of the much cheaper and far inferior Piesporter-Michelsberg. This wine is exported throughout the world and has unfortunately come to be seen by many as ‘typical’ German white wine.
Historically, most wine production (mainly for German consumption) was dry white wine produced from Riesling and Silvaner grapes. In the 1960s, in order to satisfy a perceived demand for sweeter wines in export markets (particularly the UK and US), considerable acreage of Müller-Thurgau was planted at the expense of Silvaner. However, as the UK wine market developed, tastes became steadily drier and German (usually medium–sweet) wine’s share of UK sales has declined significantly. There has been some movement back towards producing drier wines and an alteration to the strict German wine classification rules in 2000 has encouraged this. Nowadays the acreage of Müller-Thurgau declines each year. An older local grape, Elbling, is also grown, although this is mostly used for non-varietal production of sekt (sparkling wine).
German wine labels can only show varietals (Riesling for instance) if at least 85 per cent of grapes are from a single variety. If no varietal is shown, the wine is either a blend or even pure Müller-Thurgau. Labels also indicate increasing levels of wine quality, Tafelwein, Landwein, Qualitätswein, and Prädikatswein (roughly equivalent to the French designations Vin de Table, Vin de Pays, VDQS and Appellation Contrôlée). The best-quality wine (Prädikatswein) is further divided into six categories, which tell you little about the characteristics of the wine in the bottle but indicate increasing levels of ripeness of the grapes used. The first three of these (Kabinett, Spätlese and Auslese) can be dry (trochen), medium (halbtrochen) or sweet (lieblich, although this is often not shown on the label) depending upon the production process followed in the winery: basically, a longer fermentation