Region & History

In 724, Pirmin founded a monastery on the island of Reichenau. The monks there were already growing their own wine by 818, right in the heart of the Frankish Empire, long before a country called Baden even existed. Not far away, in the village of Bodman, a great-grandson of Charlemagne is said to have planted the first Pinot vines in 884, in a vineyard that tradition holds to be the oldest in the world. Today, none of this can actually be proven.

Nearly a thousand years later, a margrave left his own mark. In 1782, Karl Friedrich von Baden had more than two thousand Riesling vines planted at Schloss Staufenberg in Durbach, all one variety, without the usual mix of red and white grapes, creating Baden's first single-variety vineyard. The slope is still called Klingelberg today, and the people of Durbach have called their Riesling Klingelberger ever since.

A similar, though much less certain, story surrounds Gutedel in the Markgräflerland. Legend has it that the same Karl Friedrich brought cuttings from the Swiss town of Vevey to the Upper Rhine in 1780, but no documents confirm this, and parish records show the variety already growing in the village of Ebringen back in 1740, forty years earlier. The legend persists anyway. It simply suits a ruler who took his wine seriously.

During the 19th century, the land splintered into ever smaller plots, divided and redivided until a single vineyard could end up belonging to a dozen owners, each with only a few hundred vines. There was only one remedy: joining forces. In 1952, Baden's wine cooperatives founded a shared central winery in Breisach. That became the Badischer Winzerkeller cooperative, today the largest wine cellar in Europe.

Baden as a single wine region has only existed since the Wine Law of 1971. Before that, Tauberfranken, Kraichgau, Kaiserstuhl, Markgräflerland, and the other landscapes were independent, loosely connected wine-growing areas, each with its own name and its own rules. Since the merger, they've shared one name across more than four hundred kilometers as the crow flies. Yet Baden remains one of a kind: it's the only German region located in the warmer EU wine-growing Zone B, alongside Alsace.