Sasbachwalden

I nearly drove past Sasbachwalden because the sign at the turnoff looked like the sign for every other Black Forest village, and I had developed a certain fatigue with half-timbered facades after several days of enthusiastic sightseeing. What made me stop was the flower boxes: I caught a flash of red geraniums against dark timber frame and old stone from the car window, and there was something about the density of them — not decorative flower boxes but overflowing, almost aggressive flower boxes, geraniums in quantities that suggested a competition or a tradition with long roots — that made me turn around and park.

Sasbachwalden sits at the edge of the northern Black Forest where the forested slopes give way to the Rhine plain, and the Ortenau wine region uses exactly this geography — the warm south and southwest-facing hillsides between forest and flatland — to grow a Pinot Noir of surprising quality. The Germans call it Spätburgunder, and the Ortenau version is warmer and rounder than what Burgundy produces, with a fruit weight that comes from the Kaiserstuhl volcanic soil not far to the south. I tasted three wines at a small weingut just outside the village on the afternoon I arrived, poured by a man in his sixties who spoke no English and could not have cared less, who placed the glasses on a barrel top and let the wine make its own argument. It made a good argument.

The village has about 1400 people and no traffic lights and one primary school. What it has in excess is Gasthäuser — old inns with low beamed ceilings and wood stoves and menus that are essentially the same menu they have always been, the seasonal variation achieved through what’s available rather than what’s fashionable. I stayed at one of these inns, in a room with a ceiling so low I had to turn sideways to navigate the corner, and slept under a duvet that weighed approximately as much as a small child, and in the morning the breakfast was bread and cold cuts and a hard-boiled egg and strong black coffee, which is the right breakfast for a place like this.

The hiking trails above the village climb quickly into the forest, and by the time you’ve been walking for thirty minutes you are inside the Black Forest proper — the dense, close, silent fir forest that the lower Rhine plain never knows exists behind the pretty wine villages at its edge. The contrast between the two is something that Sasbachwalden’s geography makes unusually clear: you can stand in a vineyard in the sun drinking local Riesling and look up and see the dark forest beginning perhaps two hundred metres above you, an entirely different world hanging over the village like a permanent suggestion.

When to go: Late September and October for the wine harvest — the village is working hard and the atmosphere is purposeful and un-touristy in exactly the right way. Spring is beautiful for the combination of blossom and first vine growth. July and August are busy but the flower boxes are at their peak.