After that we headed over to the Rotkäppchen Sektkellerei to catch the daily 11:00 tour. Rotkäppchen means little red riding hood, and it refers to the red foil cover on the bottles of bubbly (Sekt) produced by the winery. Naturally the tour was in German, so I did my best of translating the odd bit as we walked through. Basically the woman leading the tour would talk for 10 minutes or so, and I'd sum it up for Marie and Jeremi in two sentences, which is about what I got. We did get a few pics from the tour though, which was only the first stop on our weekend of non-stop winy goodness. Here's a view of the main hall in the Sektkellerei, where they have concerts and events sometimes.
Here's a picture of the old oval-shaped barrels that they used to use for the sekt production. I think that they said the barrels were oval-shaped so that they could be rolled, but so that they couldn't roll away. You can see the tiny doors at the bottom, where they would send kids in to scrub them out between batches. During the tour the guide invited a kid to crawl inside and try it out. You can see another door cut into this barrel, as apparently someone got stuck on the tour once.
The next stop on the tour was the large (no longer used) cuvé barrel, where they used to blend the wine between years. It's the largest carved barrel in Germany, or something like that. Again, the tour was all in German (and it was a few weeks back now), so I'm not swearing by any of this. (Unlike the usual gospel-truth quality of our blog assertions.) As you can see written on the side of the barrel, it would hold enough for 160 000 bottles. There are also lines from a poem by Schiller on the side.
And finally, the moment that we were waiting for the whole time, the tasting. This was just the first of many glasses on this particular day, but bubbly is a good way to start any day, don't you think?
After finishing the tour, we headed up to the castle in Freyburg which, like all castles in Germany, was directly on top of the biggest hill around. We left our bikes at the bottom of the hill and walked up the Eselweg, which tranlates to the donkey path. It was the path used for bringing water up from the river (using donkeys of course) for a good 600 years, before they managed to dig a deep enough well at the top of the hill.
The castle was lovely, and it had been quite well restored after reunification. There were also fabulous audio guides (iPod nanos) in English (and French and German). The castle is very famous for being the home of St. Elisabeth, who was the Herzogin (duchess?) of the region. She devoted her life to serving the poor and sick, and died of "exhaustion" at the age of 24 after already having three kids. This year, 2007, is the 800th anniversary of her birth, and the whole region is celebrating "Elisabeth year", with lectures about the cult of Elisabeth, art exhibits related to her life and times, and even a musical about her life. We did get a few pictures from the castle, beginning with this catapult, which Marie had to get a picture of for her brother:
Here's a view through one of the latticed windows.
One of the most interesting things to me was the discussion of the toilets in the castle, which were built into the walls a bit like outhouses, but instead of falling into a pit they'd just drop several meters down to the ground surrounding the castle walls. Eventually the stink became too much, and they devised a compliclated system of water chutes to rinse the feces down the hill a bit.
Here's a view of the upstairs part of the "double chapel". There was a decree by the catholic church at the time that the royalty must worship with the plebs, which of course didn't go over so well with the royals. So they devised this bizarre two-storey chapel, where the nobility sat upstairs, the rest sat below, and there was a small trapdoor between the two levels so that they were worshipping together. Right.
And Marie took a nice picture of one of the spiral staircases:
And another lovely picture taken in the gardens outside of the castle, again by the oh-so-artistic Marie.
After getting our fill of culture and history for the day (or week) we got back on our bikes and headed toward the nearby town of Roßbach, whch was having a wine festival that afternoon. And so we had a couple of nice cold bottles of rosé and white there, and a bit of grilled meat. Here are Marie and Jeremi enjoying the cool, refreshing, tastiness. Jeremi's got a horrible fake grin in the photo, but you'll have to believe me that the other pictures were worse.
And then we were back on our bikes, at least for a couple of kilometers before stopping at another winery run by a couple of researchers who work in Jena. This place was a little paradise, as is shown by the lovely swing under the apple trees.
We sent Jeremi inside to scope out the scene for us, and he returned with a lovely bottle of white. So good in fact, that we bought a spare to bring home with us.
After that one, we were getting a bit peckish, and we ordered the most lovely cheese platter. It's possible that our growing inebriation made it seem better than it actually was, but it really did seem incredible to us at the time. (I should also mention that it was 38 degrees outside this weekend, and we were riding bikes in the sun while drinking all day. I think this may have intensified the effect of the alcohol somewhat.)
And then we were back on our bikes, heading toward Naumburg for the evening. The original plan had been to continue onto Bad Kösen that night, but at that point we were thinking that it might be a good idea to find a place to stay and get some cold water before going too much further. Here are Marie and Jeremi heading back down the road. I know that it's a bit out of focus, but believe me, it looked fuzzy to me by that time as well.
And then we found ourselves in the lovely town of Naumburg, which is famous around these parts for its lovely cathedral. We couldn't actually get in that night, as there was a concert on. Marie thought that she'd found a secret route in an open door, but we found ourselves in a room with a boys' choir changing, and decided that perhaps we'd better leave before we got into trouble. And so instead we took pictures around the beautiful courtyard. The first one shows a strange scene of fairies under some masonic imagery. Not quite sure what that's about. I took pictures while Marie and Jeremi tried to puzzle it out.
After leaving the church we found a place to stay (after many failed attempts), and then headed into the main square of the town for some beers. Marie took a picture of this heavily dormered building which also had some strange masonic symbols on it. She was beginning to suspect a conspiracy really, but managed to forget all that after a couple more drinks.
Now, if you've made it this far, I salute you. To find out what happened on Sunday, please stay tuned for the next post! (I'll give you a hint though - it involved more wine and bicycles.)
No comments:
Post a Comment