A Wine Region Less Celebrated : Tiny country, roomy farmhouse and their pick of the vines along the Moselle at harvest time--enchanting

Our French car had a backseat the size of a toy piano, yet it plunked along like a concert grand through the tiny cobbled streets of Ahn, a village on the banks of the Moselle River in the grand duchy of Luxembourg, itself a subcompact among European countries.

My wife, Margaret Backenheimer, and I were here in search of the winery Domaine Viticole Mme Aly Duhr et fils. We had an address but few street signs with which to match it. We didn’t need them, though, because everyone we spoke with seemed to know everyone else in town. We just kept driving, corkscrewing uphill through the village until a pink manor house popped into view. We hailed the first worker we saw. He proved to be one of Madame Aly Duhr’s sons, Aby.

When we announced that we were the Americans who had telephoned and volunteered to pick grapes gratis for a day, Duhr smiled broadly and motioned us into one of the nearby trucks.

At the height of the harvest last year, in early October, the winery was an imposing edifice surrounded by terraced vineyards, yet we couldn’t see a single vine. A thick morning mist from the Moselle encased the slopes, temporarily erasing the magnificent setting.

Luxembourg is famous for its outdoor beauty, its idyllic villages and castles. The chief tourist sites are the Bock Casements (ancient battlements and tunnels) in the capital of Luxembourg City, the 9th century castle at Vianden and, of course, the Moselle River Valley wine region.

One of the world’s smallest countries at 998 square miles, Luxembourg is bordered by Belgium, France and Germany. Originally settled by Celts, then made part of the Roman Empire, it was ruled by France, Germany, Spain, Austria and other European powers until 1967, when the grand duchy of Luxembourg became an independent monarchy.

A blend of French and German cultures, Luxembourg has its own national identity and its own language, Luxembourgish, a blend of German and a little French. It and French are the two official languages. English and German are also widely spoken, meaning that American travelers have few language problems.

At midpoint in its lazy meander north, the Moselle River connects Luxembourg to the two giants on its borders: to France, where the Moselle begins, and to Germany, where it empties into the Rhine. This fluid line of connection, stretching just 25 miles along Luxembourg’s southeastern edge, is a winemaker’s river valley of steep, rounded hillsides facing southeast, nearly every inch vineyards. The grape terraces trace their outlines back to Roman times.

The Moselle Valley is generally unburdened by the crowds that flock to the more extensive, more celebrated wine regions of France and Germany. While the dry white wines of Luxembourg--all produced in this valley--can hold their own against similar vintages elsewhere, so little is produced here that few cases ever escape to other countries. (United Nations figures combine it with Belgium’s wine output at 20,000 metric tons, compared with France’s output of 6.5 million metric tons.) Belgium consumes eight-tenths of Luxembourg’s minuscule wine exports, and the French and Germans consume most of the rest. In recent years there have been no exports to the United States.

Luxembourg’s cellars are small. Vineyards are one or two acres each, on average. Modern methods are in place, but considerable work is still done by hand. The Duhr winery, founded in 1872, is one of the largest in the valley, cultivating nine grape varieties on 19 acres. The acres, in turn, are divided into nine distinct little vineyards.

We cruised from terrace to terrace on the rutted roads until Aby spotted a dozen pickers gathered in the fog. These were the Polish workers who return each year at harvest. Before we joined them, Aby Duhr instructed us in how to recognize the grapes we were after, and how to tell the pinot gris from the pinot blanc and pinot noir lurking nearby.

The secret is in the color (the pinot gris is green, the pinot blanc paler, whitish, and the pinot noir a reddish purple). He also showed us how much mold we should tolerate on a bunch (no more than 25% of the grapes) before tossing it. Selecting a cluster, he pointed out what the bad mold looks like (white rather than gray); then he picked off a bit and put it on my tongue. “The bad,” he said laughing, “is very bitter, don’t you think?” The usable grapes were sweet.

Picking proved to be more monotonous than difficult, more tedious than exhausting. The pinot gris clusters were easy enough to spot; the mold, not difficult to judge, although the Polish foreman was strict, occasionally tossing out a bunch we’d clipped. Clusters without any mold at all we left to ripen further. The vines were strung up, so we didn’t have to do much bending. Our main challenge was to cut the right bunch at the right point on the stem and to avoid clipping our fingers or the fingers of fellow pickers working the other side of the trellis. As soon as we filled a plastic bucket, we passed it to a workman who emptied it into the container of a motorized cart.

The Moselle did not come into view until the fog lifted two hours before noon, but the sun quickly burned the scene below us into a postcard. Along the river’s surface we could see the reflection of green slopes, terraces, vineyards and sleepy whitewashed villages--a mirror image of the German side of the Moselle across the way. There is a saying that Luxembourgers follow the German model in the vineyards but follow French taste in winemaking. This has resulted in some of the driest whites of the Moselle. The German market, which claims most of the Moselle grape harvest, tends toward a sweeter style of wine.

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For our week in wine country, we’d booked economical accommodations a few miles inland at a farmhouse in the tiny village of Welfrange, with its church on the hill, its single town restaurant, and a dozen large farmhouses and barns. Our apartment on the Thelenhaff farm was large and commodious, situated behind the family farmhouse above what had been a wine cellar since 1768. There we cooked our own meals for the week, purchasing groceries at the nearby supermarket on the five-mile road to the Moselle.

Next door to Thelenhaff was a huge dairy barn. Each morning a herd of clanging cows filed down the cobbled street to the fields, bellowing as they passed our rental car, which they towered over. Each evening we returned from a day of wandering the Moselle Valley with a bottle of Luxembourg wine, a block of cheese, a loaf of bakery bread and a carton of ice cream. We dined by candlelight at our table overlooking the old courtyard.

Now the morning sun was rapidly warming us. We snipped grape cluster after grape cluster, no longer thinking, gliding in a dream. What we were doing others had done here for 2,000 years. When the Romans arrived, winegrowing on the Moselle entered the annals of recorded history, and the annals of poetry, as well. The Roman poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius (AD 310-394) once composed an entire poem celebrating this wine region. As he sailed the Moselle 1,600 years ago, Ausonius may have passed where we were now picking. Along the way he observed:

“A folk rejoicing in labor, husbandmen busy and nimble/Moving and working on the heights and along the slopes of the valley.”

Until the 18th century, this region produced red grapes only, and the fields spread far west and north of the Luxembourg Moselle. Today the grapes are almost all white and Luxembourg’s vineyards are confined to this narrow sloping band along the Moselle between the towns of Schengen and Wasserbillig. Vines face south and southeast, happily exposed to the precious sunlight striking northern Europe; exposed, too, to the warmth collected and emitted by the river.

Luxembourg’s three most characteristic grapes are elbling (a table wine favorite), rivaner (a riesling-sylvaner cross, Luxembourg’s strain of Germany’s muller-thurgau), and the nobler auxerrois. These three contribute to more than 80% of the national wine output, although other grapes are starting to catch on. Some wineries these days are concentrating on less popular varietals. The leading grape in the Duhr vineyards, for example, is the pinot gris and the very one we happened to be picking.

There’s one other designation worth noting: cremant. Only France and Luxembourg are permitted to use this designation for sparkling wines. Cremant refers to the creamy froth that effervesces when a bottle is uncorked and to certain procedures, such as allowing the grapes to be pressed by their own weight.

At Caves St. Martin near Remich, we took our first sips of the Moselle’s sparkling wines. After a 30-minute tour conducted in energetic English by Steve Glange, a student from the University of Liege in Belgium, we reached the end of a metric mile of rock-hewn cellars where the fine sparkling wines were sold at less than $10 a bottle.

Luxembourg’s largest sparkling wine producer, Bernard-Massard, also offers tours and tastings. It did not take us long to locate their chateau in Grevenmacher, facing the Moselle. Bernard-Massard produces roughly 10 times the sparkling wines of Caves St. Martin, which still rotates each of its 40,000 bottles by hand each day. (At Bernard-Massard, machines handle it.)

Tastings and tours at other wineries along Luxembourg’s Moselle are a fine pastime all summer, although by autumn most cellars are too busy with the harvest to do much more than sell bottles and cases to visitors. We stopped at a number of the large wine cooperatives that run up and down the valley. Few were open, although we did talk our way into a tour of the co-op at Wormeldange, where we watched the grapes coming in for the crush.

The first of the Moselle’s six great cooperatives was born in Grevenmacher in 1921; today, these co-ops are combined in the Vinsmoselle Co-operative Co. Each summer Vinsmoselle offers guided tours for wine tasters and for hiking enthusiasts (since the wine-country makes up a notable portion of Luxembourg’s celebrated hiking trail system). Gathering 1,000 grape growers and more than 2,000 acres of vineyards under its umbrella, Vinsmoselle is Luxembourg’s largest wine producer by far, accounting for 70% of the nation’s annual production. Yet if the co-ops and the champagne cellars dwarf the Duhr estate, the small family winery is more representative of the Moselle tradition.

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As the day’s rising sun turned us from cold to hot, we looked forward to our lunch break, which was not called until well after the noon hour. Returning to the manor, we joined the Duhr family for dinner; the Polish workers surrounded their own adjacent table. A hearty meal of potatoes and ham, prepared by Aby Duhr’s wife, arrived in serving dishes. Aby’s brother, Georges, an ophthalmologist home to help with the harvest, filled us in on the Duhr operations, as did his mother, Aly Duhr, who has kept a strong hand in the business. Some of her school-age grandchildren joined in too, until there were a dozen of us. At one point we were treated to a tasting of three of the Duhr’s pinot gris, each delightful.

After our midday meal, Aly Duhr showed us the accommodations for the Polish workers, located on the top floor of the manor. The rooms were fine enough to be let for vacationers, we said. It was an idea that pleased Madame Duhr. The pickers used these rooms only during harvest.

In the end we did not make a full day of the harvest--a taste was enough to last. As we were leaving, Georges Duhr pointed to the large building next door, just outside the gate. “That’s where we all went to school,” he said. This underlined the immediacy of life along the Moselle and the intimate family enterprise that winemaking remains in this valley.

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GUIDEBOOK: Finding Vines

Getting there: Lufthansa, United, KLM, Northwest, Air France, Swissair and British Airways offer connecting service, with one change of planes, from LAX to Luxembourg. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at about $1,130.

Wineries: (Some wineries have tasting rooms; most don’t. Visiting hours change frequently so it’s a good idea to call in advance. English is widely spoken.)

Domaine Viticole Mme Aly Duhr et fils, 9, Rue Aly Duhr, L-5401 Ahn, Luxembourg; tel. (352) 76043.

Caves Bernard-Massard 8, Rue du Pont, L-6773, Grevenmacher, Luxembourg; tel. (352) 755451, fax (352) 75606.

Caves St. Martin, 53, Route de Stadtbredimus, L-5570 Remich, Luxembourg; tel. (352) 699091, fax (352) 699434.

Tours of area wineries are offered by Vinsmoselle, Chateau de Stadtbredimus, B.P. 40, L-5601 Remich, Luxembourg; tel. (352) 698314, fax (352) 619189.

Where to stay: We stayed at the farm/inn Thelenhaff, 5, Waassergaass, L-5698 Welfrange, Luxembourg. Two apartments above an old wine cellar rent for $325-$430 per week plus a $35 cleaning fee. The proprietor speaks fluent English. ; tel. (352) 668267, fax (352) 676050.

For more information: Luxembourg National Tourist Office, 17 Beekman Place, New York, NY 10022, (212) 935-8888; fax (212) 935-5896.

Office National du Tourisme, 77 Rue d’Anvers, B.P. 1001, L-1010 Luxembourg, tel. (352) 400808, fax (352) 404748.

--J.D.B.