If the wine world held a beauty contest, the 2,000-year-old vineyards of the curvy Mosel Valley would be an easy winner. The steep slopes that produce some of the best rieslings on the planet are an ever-changing delight to the eyes as well as the palate, and represent one of those rare times when the collaboration of man and nature turned out exactly right.
Until now, that is. In one of the most insensitive acts of infrastructure spending that modern Germany is likely to witness, regional politicians are about to construct a towering 1.7-kilometre bridge across the Mosel at the renowned wine town of Ürzig, part of a new four-lane highway that will permanently alter some of the riesling-lover's most cherished vineyards.
English wine writer Hugh Johnson has called the highway "this mad, destructive, unnecessary road," and with good reason. It represents the strange culmination of an outdated 40-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan to speed up connections between two American air bases in the event of war with the Warsaw Pact.
But even though the Cold War threat has disappeared, the autobahn ideology has found a way to survive - one of the American air bases is now a remote and underused Ryanair facility, and local advocates insist that the new €270-million highway is needed to make the publicly owned airport profitable as a cargo hub.
The bridge across the Mosel at the famed Ürziger Würzgarten vineyard is a key shortcut in the route, designed to shave 30 minutes off the trip for trucks hauling cargo from Belgium and the Netherlands. It doesn't seem like much compared with 2,000 years of riesling history, especially at a price that private investors want no part of. But then politically motivated infrastructure spending obeys rules that neither economists nor oenophiles can ever hope to understand.
Whatever great reputations they enjoy among connoisseurs in the wider world, celebrated wine regions are often treated as antiquated rustics and pushovers by the megaproject crowd. France's fast-train network, which demands straight-line shortcuts as energetically as the Mosel bridge-builders, has at various times threatened to ravage the vineyards of Vouvray, the Côtes du Rhône and most recently Graves, just south of Bordeaux. Proposed expressways have menaced Burgundy's Montrachet vineyard, the Rhône's Côte Rôtie, and Spain's Ribera del Duero, where 25 hectares of the famed Vega Sicilia estate is due to be sacrificed for the motorists' greater good. Even the Champagne region has had to make way for a massive nuclear-waste facility, whose leaks have contaminated the groundwater that feeds the high-priced vines.
So the odds appear stacked against the artisan winemakers of the Mosel and their honeyed, long-lived rieslings, described in The World Atlas of Wine as "profound yet frivolous ... wines that beg to be compared with music and poetry."