Valea Viilor means Valley of the Vineyards, and the name is honest: the slopes around the village were planted with vines long before anyone thought of mapping them. The Saxons called it Wurmloch, and its fortified church, a tall Gothic hall with a defensive storey built over the choir and a ring wall around it, is one of the seven on the World Heritage list.
The village lies a few kilometres off the Târnava Mare valley, between Mediaș and Copșa Mică, in a side valley that feels a world away from the main road. The church dominates the centre. Its massive walls and the battlemented upper level, where defenders could drop stones and fire through slits, tell you everything about life on this frontier in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when raiding armies came often enough that every village needed a castle of its own. Inside it is plain and whitewashed, Lutheran since the Reformation, with a carved altar and the faded paint of older decoration on the walls.
Riding in is short and pleasant, a narrow lane winding up between orchards and old vineyard terraces, some tended, many gone wild. It is the kind of road where you let the bike roll and look around. Back on the main valley road, traffic picks up and the surface is mostly good. The ride to Saschiz goes east through more Saxon country, past rolling hills and villages that each have their own church-fortress.
Copșa Mică, four kilometres away, deserves a mention for different reasons. Under communism it was home to a carbon black plant and a non-ferrous metals smelter that left it one of the most polluted towns in Europe, with soot so thick that sheep were said to turn grey. The factories have mostly closed and the landscape is slowly recovering, but it is a sobering contrast to the pastoral calm of Valea Viilor just up the road.
For practical matters, Copșa Mică and Mediaș have fuel and shops; Mediaș is the bigger and better stocked of the two, with a handsome old centre of its own. Valea Viilor has a small shop and sometimes someone at the church to let you in. In late summer the air in the village smells of ripe plums, and the vineyards above it turn bronze by October.