Stuttgart Wine Museum

About this place

A museum of viticulture and wine making fills the old communal press house in Uhlbach, a wine village that is now a district of Stuttgart on the slopes above the river Neckar. Stuttgart is one of the very few large European cities that still has commercial vineyards inside the built-up area itself, and this museum exists to explain that oddity. The displays cover close to two thousand years, from Roman planting on these slopes onward: presses, barrels and the cooper's tools, the terrace walls and the enormous labour their building demanded, the Wuerttemberg grape varieties such as Trollinger, Lemberger and Riesling, and the reason a region that drinks nearly everything it makes stays unknown beyond its borders. There are scent stations, film of local growers talking about their work, and paintings by the artist Eugen Haefele. In the same building a Vinothek sells and pours the wines of the district. Tickets are only three euros, but the museum is seasonal: it opens roughly from March to November, on Thursday and Friday afternoons and on Saturday and Sunday from late morning until evening, and it closes Monday to Wednesday. Three quarters of an hour to an hour and a half is enough. Reach it by suburban train to Obertuerkheim and then a bus, or walk up through the vineyards from the valley, which is by far the finer arrival. The hall and the first floor of the Vinothek are accessible to those with limited mobility.