Wo Ist Die Weinmanufaktur?

Day 3

Monday morning. New rule in the hotel room: Please do not call family in America again and please do not have an all out panic attack because we are not home by midnight. If you wake up in the morning and we are not there, THEN you can start worrying. Deal. Now, back to vacay! Time to get the awesome week started! We get a late start, blame it on the jet lag and decide to check out some wine tasting. The rail system isn’t all that difficult to figure out and we were quite proud of our ability to make it there without missing a stop. Finding the winery would be a whole other adventure. The map said it was a mere five-minute walk from the bahnhof. One hour later we were still searching. We decide to ask somebody. Between our broken, ok nonexistent, German and his broken English we think we might actually make it there. Five minutes later we are there! Wine tasting works a little differently over here in Germany. It’s free and you pour it yourself. As many wines as you want to taste and as much as you want. EXCELLENT. Why don’t they adopt this brilliant idea in Napa and Sonoma? Maybe the same reason why America doesn’t adopt the idea of beer-drinking at all hours and all places. We would take it to the extreme, as Americans often do. The land of the free doesn’t behave well when set too free. We purchase wine, only 6 euros a bottle. Why can’t Napa adopt the low-cost mentality too?! By the time we leave the winery it’s late afternoon and time to head back to the hotel, we told Tony we’d be there. Dinner is at Schönbuch, it’s a brewery, of course. That’s the thing in Germany: every place brews it’s own bier, serves pretty much only their own bier, and any bier you drink is served in a glass labeled with the bier. I did not drink one bier in a glass labeled with another bier and I never had the same bier twice, which puts me at something near a total of trying thirty different biers throughout the trip. In fulfilling my goal of branching out and trying all new foods on this vacay, I select 2 Bavarian sausages with a pretzel. The pretzel was mouth-watering, the Bavarian sausage was not so bearable. Oh and apparently it’s necessary to remove the thin casing before eating it. Stupid Americans. My first taste of Apfelstrudel (German heaven on earth) and I am ready to call it a night!