Deidesheim is what a wine town looks like when it has been rich for five hundred years and has kept the receipts. The cobbled centre is a short walk around a Gothic church, a Renaissance town hall with an outside staircase, and half-timbered houses painted in warm colours, with a few of the big estates, Bassermann-Jordan, Bürklin-Wolf and others, tucked into old courtyards. These families made Riesling famous well before Germany had a wine law, and their cellars have grown a fine reputation.
The town's most delightful ritual happens on the Tuesday after Whitsun, when the neighbouring town of Lambrecht hands over a live billy goat and Deidesheim auctions it off in public, a custom that goes back to an old dispute over grazing rights. It is the sort of local tradition that survives because nobody can bear to end it. The villages around Deidesheim, including Forst and Ruppertsberg, have some of the most celebrated vineyards in the country, with a layer of basalt in the soil that holds the heat.
For riders, the Wine Route here is at its most polished. The road between Neustadt and Bad Dürkheim runs flat and gentle through vines and villages, often a single lane of tarmac between rows of Riesling, and the Haardt hills rise in a green wall to the west. Traffic is heavy at weekends and during the harvest, so choose a weekday if you can. In Bad Dürkheim, a few kilometres north, there is a petrol station on the main road, a huge wine barrel that doubles as a restaurant and, in September, a vast sausage and wine festival that fills the whole town.
Food in Deidesheim can be anything from a glass of wine and bread in a vintner's courtyard to a long and expensive lunch at a table with a tablecloth, since the town has a number of serious restaurants. Fuel is better found in Bad Dürkheim than in the village itself.
Park outside the old town and walk in. The streets are narrow, the stone is smooth, and there is plenty of tarmac around the wall for a bike.