Gengenbach
"They use the town hall facade as an Advent calendar in December. Twenty-four windows, twenty-four artists. You come back every year and it's different."
I walked into Gengenbach through the Haigeracher Tor — one of three medieval gates that still stand in the old town wall — on a Thursday evening in September, and the smell that reached me first was not the woodsmoke or the river or the old stone that I associated with Black Forest towns. It was wine. The harvest had begun in the surrounding Ortenau vineyards and the air carried something fermentive and slightly sweet, and a group of men in stained aprons were moving plastic crates of Riesling grapes off a flatbed truck outside a winery on the main street. This is what Gengenbach is: a walled former imperial city of about eleven thousand people that has been making wine in its hinterland since the Benedictine monks established the abbey here in the eighth century, and it has not forgotten.
The Marktplatz is the town’s centrepiece and, by any objective measure, it is one of the finest market squares in the German southwest. The old Rathaus occupies the north side, a baroque building from 1784 with a facade of regular windows that become, in December, the world’s largest Advent calendar — each window illuminated by a different artist’s installation on each day of December until Christmas. I had seen photographs of this tradition before I arrived, and it had seemed like the kind of clever gimmick that towns invent when they want people to come in the off-season. Standing in the square in September, looking at those blank windows in a building of genuine beauty, I understood that the Advent calendar works because the building is extraordinary enough to support it.
The vineyards rise directly from the town’s eastern edge — the forest begins above them, so you have this compressed vertical stack of town, vine, and fir that is particular to the Kinzig valley’s geography. I hiked up through the Ortenau vineyard terraces in the hour before sunset, past rows of Pinot Gris and Müller-Thurgau, the grapes still hanging heavy and sweet-smelling, and reached a forest track that ran along the boundary between cultivation and wild growth. Below me, the town was a grid of red rooftops and church spires in the fading light. The Kinzig river was a silver thread to the west. I came back down in near-dark and ate at a Weinstube where the Spätburgunder was served in thick-stemmed glasses at a temperature that suggested it had come straight from a cellar not far away.
The abbey is quieter than the town itself. Founded by Benedictines in the eighth century and dissolved in the Napoleonic reorganisations, the complex now serves as a school, but the cloister garden is accessible and the church remains open, its whitewashed baroque interior cool and dim and smelling of stone and candle wax. I sat in a pew for ten minutes in the midday silence and heard the clock on the tower strike noon with a weight that felt appropriate to a building that has been marking hours since before the Black Forest was a concept anyone had named.
When to go: September for the wine harvest — the atmosphere in the town and vineyards is exceptional and the new-season Federweißer (young wine) appears in the Weinstuben. December for the Advent calendar, which draws visitors from across Germany but retains a genuine local quality on weekday evenings.