Whe has taste does not have to have a face. The Nahe can sing a fatalistic drinking song about it. Because the image of her is probably the vaguest of all German wine-growing regions, a single large blank space, while with her competitors a whole flood of associations rises from every open bottle like a good spirit: the spectacular steep slopes of the Moselle, which have grown over two millennia; the merry wine-growing villages of the Palatinate with their sandstone estate palaces and the Dionysian wine festivals; the tender dialogue between Wingerten and meandering rivers on the Franconian Main; the arch-romantic interplay of knight’s castles, vineyards and the beautiful seductress Loreley on the Middle Rhine; the filigree rows of vines that nestle in love on the flanks of the Kaiserstuhl on their terraces: the Nahe, the faceless giant of taste among the German wine-growing regions, has nothing to match against all these iconographic backdrops – apart from their wines, which for every connoisseur are among the crown jewels of the German vine treasures belong.
Great location
We are in the middle of paradise. That is the name of the heart of the 230 meter high Bosenberg near Bosenheim, perhaps out of defiance, perhaps out of sarcasm, one of the top locations of the winemaker Martin Korrell, with whom we look out over the lower Nahe. At our feet are cleared beet fields, busy expressways and the commercial areas of Bad Kreuznach, which eat into the landscape like terminal moraines. The vineyards of Rheinhessen and the Rheingau, Rottland and Roseneck, Scharlachberg and Rochuskapelle tower proudly on the horizon high above the Rhine, while the Nahe gets lost somewhere in the invisible nowhere. The wine village of Bosenheim, in which there are still a dozen winegrowers, remains roughly in line with the German new-build district aesthetics and is thus becoming an archetypal outpost of the Nahe – presumably a tribute to the comparatively short history of the wine-growing region, which only became an independent wine-growing region in 1971 became. But she has made herself comfortable and happy in her supposed Cinderella existence and does not sort peas, but quietly selects the best grapes for great plants.