Adventure: Mosel Valley, Germany

Cat and I journeyed here in October last year.  It is a postcard vineyard landscape: a gorgeous river meandering through cliffs and steep banks terraced with vines - and the occasional castle.  This is the centre of German riesling territory.

We stayed in Koblenz and took the train to Cochem, which takes under an hour.  We took a leisurely boat back, which takes about 5 hours.

Cochem is lovely too, with steep windy cobblestone streets leading up to an awesome castle on the hill.

We couldn't quite work out the deal with wine tasting: it seems that unlike with Australian cellar doors you only taste a wine to see if you do in fact want to buy a bottle, rather than sampling all of what they have on offer and seeing what you like.  Anyway, we found one cellar door who were very helpful if a little gruff and we sampled their rieslings.  All but the driest tasted too sweet to us, being used to Australian rieslings, but the dry was pretty yummy and the 'half-dry' would be a good match with sweet or spicy food.

Anyway, I'd thoroughly recommend a trip to this stunning part of Germany.