Wurzburg

Wurzburg is the Franken wine capital in Germany. Its about a 2 hour train ride from Wiesbaden so I decided to check it out on Sunday.


The two main sites I checked out were the Residence and Fortress Marienberg. Both are homes to the PrinceBishops when the state had merged church and state. Along with the merging of c&s came the new position of princebishop. (history lesson brought to you by my Residence tour guide)

Both sides were quite impressive. Here's a picture looking up at Fortress Marienberg.

The Residence does not allow you to take pictures inside but I did take some of the gardens. The building was build to resemble Versailles and it certainly does. I would expect the gardens would be amazing in the spring.





I had planned to spend the rest of my afternoon wine tasting, since that was part of the draw of this town. My first stop was Haus des Frankenweins, and it was a good thing it was. Here I was able to taste wines from a lot of the other vineyards. The woman that did do the tasting explained that many of the other vineyards only offer tastings for a fee and with a reservation. I certainly lucked out.

The most common grape in Franken is the Silvaner. Many of the bottles from this area are not your typical wine bottle. Here's a picture of what they do look like. There's a few myths as to why the bottles look this way (I'll give you the short versions). The first is that wine was enjoyed from a leather bag way back when, that had this shape and so the shape stayed when the moved to bottles. The other story is that because wine was cheaper to obtain than water, everyone in Wurzburg used to make their own wine. The royalty wanted to distinguish their wine from all the others so they designed these special bottles to set them apart. I don't know which story is true, if any.

There's a lot to check out in Wurzburg (http://www.wuerzburg.de/system/international/englisch/index.html)