Region & History

The Romans are said to have planted vines on the slopes above the Neckar as early as the second century, though this isn't firmly documented. Winegrowing is only reliably recorded later: a donation charter from Lorsch Abbey dated 766 mentions vineyards in the area. By the sixteenth century, Neckar wine was sought after far beyond the region, thanks above all to a now-forgotten variety called Klevner. Duke Friedrich I brought order to the vineyards in 1607: his Herbstordnung (autumn regulations) prescribed uniform rules for harvest and vinification for the first time.

Before the Thirty Years' War, the vineyard area is said to have covered around 45,000 hectares, more than four times today's total. The war destroyed villages, people, and vineyards alike. What grew back afterward was often Putzscheren, a high-yielding Tokaji variety that rarely ripened properly in Württemberg and produced thin, sour wine. The ducal government tried to ban its cultivation. The winegrowers kept planting it anyway, since quantity paid off faster than quality, and everything grew together in a jumble in the vineyards regardless.

It was King Wilhelm I who finally reversed course in the early nineteenth century. He had Riesling vines brought in from the Rhineland and tested new methods in his own vineyards. In 1826, Georg Christian Kessler founded Germany's first sparkling wine house in Esslingen am Neckar, filling the first bottles with Frühburgunder wine from the area. It still exists today and is considered the oldest of its kind in Germany. A wine improvement society founded in 1825 carried this new seriousness into the villages. Most winegrowers, however, simply couldn't afford to remodel their vineyards at the time.

The real turning point came from below. In 1858, fifty winegrowers in Fellbach joined together to form Germany's first independent winegrowers' cooperative. Their only goal: to produce better quality together than any one of them could achieve alone. The model spread across the country over the following decades, village by village, valley by valley.

Today more than fifty cooperatives market around eighty percent of Württemberg's wine, a share no other German wine region comes close to. The largest, the Zentralgenossenschaft in Möglingen, pools grapes from more than eleven thousand winegrowing families through its member cooperatives. Anyone drinking a Trollinger or Lemberger from Württemberg today is usually also drinking a piece of this history of small growers who joined forces.