Bernkastel-Kues, Germany: a Mosel wine town of half-timbered houses and Riesling slopes

Few market squares feel as theatrical as the one in Bernkastel, where gabled timber houses lean together around a Renaissance town hall of 1608 and a fountain of 1606, and the impossibly narrow Spitzhäuschen of 1416 tilts above the crowd. This twin town on both banks of the Mosel - Bernkastel on one side, Kues on the other, joined in 1905 - is the lively heart of the Middle Mosel wine country. A town of around 7,000 people in Rhineland-Palatinate, it sits about 50 kilometres north-east of Trier and roughly 100 kilometres south-west of Koblenz, ringed by some of the steepest vineyards in Europe.

Those slopes grow Riesling above all, and the most celebrated of them, the small Bernkasteler Doctor vineyard, gave rise to a medieval legend that its wine cured an ailing archbishop. Wine taverns and cellars fill the ground floors of the old houses, and the riverside promenade draws strollers and Mosel cruise boats alike.

A castle, a cardinal and the Romans

High above Bernkastel rise the ruins of Burg Landshut, a summer castle of the archbishops of Trier built in the late thirteenth century on the foundations of a Roman fort and gutted by fire in 1692. The town received its rights in 1291. Across the river in Kues was born, in 1401, Nikolaus von Kues - Nicholas of Cusa - one of the great minds of the fifteenth century; the hospital he founded, the Cusanusstift, still stands with its remarkable medieval library.

Wine festivals and river walks

The Mosel wine museum and the tasting cellars of the Cusanusstift introduce the region's vintages, while late summer brings one of the Mosel's largest wine festivals to the streets. With its bridge linking the two banks, Bernkastel-Kues makes a natural base for exploring the river's looping curtain of vineyard and village.