The German Wine Road begins, or ends, depending on which way you are pointed, at a gate. In Schweigen-Rechtenbach, a wine village pressed right up against the French border, stands the Deutsches Weintor, a heavy stone arch built in the 1930s to mark the southern terminus of the Weinstrasse. It is a slightly pompous thing, very much of its time, and today it houses a wine bar and a viewing gallery from which you look out over vineyards rolling north toward the Haardt hills. A couple of kilometres south, across a border you will barely notice, lies Wissembourg in Alsace.
Ride down into Wissembourg if you have an hour. It is a small, handsome French town of about nine thousand people with half-timbered houses leaning over the little river Lauter, a big Gothic abbey church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, and remnants of the old ramparts. The town has been fought over more than once. In August 1870 the first battle of the Franco-Prussian War was fought on the heights just south of it, and the Lines of Wissembourg, a chain of earthworks, ran along the Lauter in the eighteenth century. Today the only thing that changes at the border is the language on the bakery signs and the price of fuel, which is often worth comparing.
For riders, this end of the Weinstrasse is the gentle overture. The road runs through the vineyards at the foot of the Palatinate Forest, the Pfälzerwald, which rises on your left as a dark wooded wall of red sandstone. If you want proper curves, the forest is where they are: small roads climb west into the trees toward Bad Bergzabern and the castles around Dahn, with crags of red rock and plenty of switchbacks. Back on the wine road, the pace is slow, villages come every few kilometres, and in autumn you will share it with tractors hauling grapes and walkers holding glasses of Federweisser, the cloudy young wine sold in September and October.
The southern Palatinate is one of the warmest corners of Germany, and you see it in the plants: figs, almonds and even the odd lemon tree in a sheltered courtyard. In March the almond blossom turns the hillsides pink. Fuel, food and coffee are easy here, in Wissembourg or in the larger villages along the road, and the local Pfälzer cooking is hearty: Saumagen, a stuffed pig's stomach that sounds worse than it is, and Flammkuchen once you cross into Alsace.