Kiechlingsbergen. Photo: Flickr/kvd/nicke eisen

Acres and acres of green grape fields surrounded by, and snaking up, quaint little hills.  Half-timber houses lining narrow streets.  High wooden doors hiding courtyards from the street where an old woman waters her potted plants, romantically crumbling stone walls, a little castle, a perfect blue lake.  Is this heaven?  No, no, just small-town German in the middle of wine country.

We’d driven down to Kiechlinsbergen for a house-warming party, friends of friends living in the country and working at an organic farm, living in a cottage with a terrace and garden roofed with ripening grape plants and facing the neatly rowed, brilliant green fields and the red-orange roofs that fill the tiny valley that houses wine makers and farmers and people looking to get away from city life.

Population-wise, Kiechlinsbergen is probably as big as the village where I come from, but instead of fields of cows, rows of grape plants destined to be fermented and turned into that lovely drink called wine.  A part of “Endingen”, it sounds like we’ve come to the end of the world,  and it is in fact almost the end of Germany with the French border only about 15 kilometers away.  Borders or not, it feels peaceful and alive, like some sort of final paradise, and we sit on the terrace all afternoon, eating fresh-baked pizzas and gazing out at the grapes.

On the hill above the town is a small church that rings the time every half hour or so, and I chuckle remember something I wrote about Germany on my first visit at the age of 17: “It seems that there is always a church bell ringing somewhere in this country.”

Besides the charming view, the town offers surprising number of historical sights for its size.  An impressive looking cloister built in 1778 that now houses a winemakers collective, the oldest still-complete Franconian courtyard (built in 1544), and a castle (built in 1774), to name a few.  And everything within a very pleasant walking distance from everything else.  Even residential corners offer little monuments or exhibits of equipment previously used to press or make wine.

It is an aesthetic that is classic to German villages, to Americanized stereotypes of Romantic Europe.  Upon sending photos from the weekend to a friend, she replied: “How gorgeous, it looks just like a storybook!”  And it felt like a storybook too, sitting on the porch of that cottage surrounded by grapes and hills and green.  The only thing missing were the servants with fans and a platter from which to feed us those ripened green bunches.