Monday, April 9, 2018

A visit to Mesenich, the original home of the Binzens


April 2, 2018: We drove from Brussels to Mesenich today. We’ve counted over 300 wind turbines in the recent 3 days of driving from the Netherlands, to Belgium, and today into Germany. In the final hour of our drive, and entering the valleys of the Moselle, the landscape grew dramatically beautiful – granted that it’s early April, and it’s all just getting ready to move out of winter brown and bare. But the riverside towns are madly picturesque, and the hills rise steeply from the riverside, all knitted with small vineyards.
   
In recent days I had researched online for Binzens in the area, and I was aware of a family in the next town upriver, Senheim, 2 km away (also a town in which some of our direct Binzen forbears had resided). We drove through Senheim, and I figured I’ll try to drop in on them soon, as I’d found their address....
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Pulling off the river round into the tiny burg of Mesenich, you’re immediately into narrow little streets. It wasn’t hard to find our hotel; you’d be in and out of the place in a couple of minutes driving at a crawl. Our proprietress speaks no English, so we were challenged by that, but quickly a friendly fellow, Andreas, a regular guest, appeared and helped orient us. The hoteliers are winemakers – they’re all winemakers here. Hirschen-Schuster, since 1585. We can buy it cheaply in-house. Andreas explained that Moselle wine has been popular since Roman times, and it excels because of the soil, filled with ‘black stone’ (slate, we later observed) that absorbs the sun’s heat and holds onto it into the night, warming the wine territory in a most favorable way.

The wine is very good. After our first taste, we headed out for a walk. Out behind the hotel, which is the third block up from the riverside and the outer edge of town, the hillside immediately slopes steeply upward in vineyards, occasionally crossed by narrow lanes paralleling the river. The walls that run alongside some of these paths are extensively decorated with busts of notable local vintners, and other artistic curiosities. We walked up to about the fifth of those lanes, high over the valley. From there you can walk either direction, up or downstream. Both are said to be lovely walks. Tomorrow we may walk to Senheim and try to find these Binzens. When I asked our hotelier Norbert if he knew the name, he said there hadn’t been any Binzens living in Mesenich for some time, though there used to be an auto mechanic, and we grabbed the phone book and showed me the names of the several Binzens residing in Senhals.

We later had dinner in a delightful little restaurant, Bai, in a wine cellar, just down the street. And the waitress there also knew of the Binzens one town over. So it’s a small place.

And it’s a vacation destination, for sure. We’re told the summer wine festival is something marvelous. (There’s a German word for this event; there’s no translation; it’s an ancient tradition.)

April 5: Now we are driving out, after a delightful stay. We want to highly recommend the place we stayed in, Hirschen-Schuster. It’s at the high end of town, with vineyards stretching up the hill out the back – still just 3 short blocks from the river. It has apartments with kitchens, so one can save a lot on food bills.

On our second day, we kicked around town, and drove downstream as far as the sizeable holiday town of Cochem, topped by a magnificent castle on a hill, where we shopped for food. Later, Xenia and walked from our hotel to the next town upriver, Senheim, there to try to meet the Binzen family we had heard about. It was a half hour’s walk through vineyards all the way, up and over a lovely mountain pass, then plunging down into town. The church bell was ringing as we strolled down into the small streets. I in turn rang the bell of Thomas Binzen, and found a slightly portly man about my age; I explained to him what my deal was, and he understood, and then we attempted a conversation for several minutes, he in German and me in English, and I understanding almost nothing, and not having been invited in, we took our leave, with me noting for another day that I ought to learn at least a 500-word German vocabulary for moments like this! We walked back home alongside the river, and knowing that some of our Binzen forebears had lived in Senheim, I imagined how often they had surely walked these ways many times.

The next day we set off on a hike downstream to the small village of Bielstein, where I envisioned a visit to the castle ruins on the hill above followed by a lunch at the very picturesque riverside café. Manuel, Norbert’s son and the current generation’s proprietor of our hotel’s wine business, drove the short trip to Bielstein in his van to allow me to drop our car there and then bring me back. Our walk began well, in a flatter highland of vineyards, but about halfway through, the light rain intensified into a real drencher. I ran the rest of the way to get the car, while the others cut it short and headed into the village of Briedern. The latter part of the hike proved to be a dramatic single-track high up a very steep wooded mountainslope, ending at the castle, which had suffered terrible bombardments in the 18th century.

After drying off at home, we drove to Cochem, which is a pretty place full of small hotels. We walked up the steep narrow streets to visit the “castle,” which turned out to be built in the 19th century by a rich guy from Berlin, on top of the ruins of a castle that dated back to 1000 A.D. Then it was an early dinner at that café in Bielstein I’d intended earlier, where we tried for the first time the local red wine. Then back at our hotel it was a wine tasting that stretched on for more than 3 hours. The basement level of the hotel is the winemaking operations, which we toured, and all the wine business on this street, aptly named Weinbergstrasse, have rooms for these elaborate and lengthy evening social wine-tastings. They are served with sliced sausages and bread and cheese, pickled mushrooms, and such. We went through about of dozen of their varieties, most of them delightful, and featuring very little of the old-fashioned sweet German taste, which they have clearly evolved beyond in order to give the people what they want. They sell almost all their wine direct to customers.

There we chatted with Andreas and his friends, and Manuel, who once interned in Sonoma and served with helpful explanations of the various varieties and growing conditions. We learned among other things that zippers are referred to as Sipples, and that there’s a popular phrase, “Es ist in die Binsen gegangen”, which means, Things are going to the dogs, up in smoke – literally, that’s going to end up in the reeds – Binsen being a sort of reed. From the internet:  “The phrase comes from the duck hunt, when the ducks flee into the reeds (colloquially: the rushes) or struck birds fall into the reeds, they are no longer findable for the dog and thus lost.” The reeds would also account for the “broom” meaning, as they said it’s possible brooms may once have been made from these Binsen reeds. But all in all, it’s a sound-alike; these rushes aren’t really “Binzen.”

We also learned from Manuel that his sister-in-law was previously married to a Binzen, with whom all are still on good terms! And I found but was unable to contact in the area, a guy with a construction company; a plumber; and an artist - all Binzens. So the Binzens are definitely ensconced around here.

We also learned from Andreas that one can buy a house here for like 50-60,000 euros. The young folks can’t make a living here, except by making wine, which I guess is passe as a lifestyle. The Dutch have been snapping up vacation homes.

We want to come back here. We intend to. It is beautiful.