Terraced Vineyards
The wine terraces in Winningen, the old wine-growing community on the lower Mosel, are amongst the steepest in the world. Up to 20 individual terraces built above one another form the beginnings of a long running wine-growing story.
Nowadays the dry stonewalls of the vineyards, which have been built over the centuries by generations of wine growers, are a unique eco-climate for a multitude of micro-flora and -fauna long threatened with extinction. There are alone over 500 various types of beetles (many already threatened with extinction) which have been found in surveys of the Uhlen site. Besides the wall lizard and very rare emerald lizard warming themselves on the walls in the first sunshine in spring, the butterfly apollo winningensis has its largest colony (of only four known) north of the Alps.
And only in these Grand-Cru sites, tightly bound into the ecosystem, the classic Riesling grapevine is able to extract from the slate beds the high amounts of minerals and nutrients required for the wine. With the old grapevines only producing small yields of grapes the wines are each unique and cannot be reproduced anywhere else in the world.
