The Weisenborns in Kallstadt (1)

Posted on Facebook on 20 August 2016.

My wife and I had three delightful weeks of holiday, seeing again Avignon and Arles (France), our friends in Genova and Calosso (Italy), making new friends - the parents of one of our daughter's friends - in Geneva (Switzerland) and seeing Annecy and Le Val d'Ajol (France) for the first time.

And also ... meeting our Weisenborn namesakes and possibly very distant relatives, the Weisenborn wine growers in Kallstadt in Rheinland-Pfalz.

I can now say, from first-hand experience, that there is no shortage of good wine and good food in and around Kallstadt. And as we now live in Germany, already for over 6 six years, this makes us feel good about our new homeland. In comparison we found France much impoverished to what we remember and well below the present-day German standard.

Contrary to what the name may suggest, Kallstadt is not a town but a small, very picturesque village on a gently sloping hill, with about 1100 inhabitants. The Weisenborns are quite present there, both in the village and in the graveyard, that is: in the gone-by present.

We took home 30 bottles of wine from the two wine houses Weisenborn in Kallstadt. We - the Weisenborns in Nordhorn - brew our own beer, and we can sense the taste of many Dutch and Belgian beers when we see the label. We do not know much more about wine than "we like this one" after having drunk it. We can say: the wines we have taken home are good. We had both our Dutch and Italian friends taste the wines and they agreed: the wines from the Weisenborn wine house are good wines, real wines. And they are affordable: the bottles we bought were about 4 Euros on average.

In a next posting I will include many more pictures. The ones included here give a flavour: the "Strausswirtschaft" of Bernd Weisenborn and his wife and children, and two of the Weisenborn graves in the Kallstadt grave yard.