On our second day in Luxembourg, we took a field trip. Luxembourg has a wine country running along its southeastern edge, and I was dying to go to a vineyard, since that’s definitely something we don’t have up north. But before we headed out of town, I had this cappuccino covered with a mountain of whipped cream. I actually had 2 cappuccinos like that during my time in Luxembourg. At the first place they called it “italiana,” but I don’t recall ever having a cappuccino in Italy with a massive amount of whipped cream.
So, the field trip! The only way to get to the wine country was to take a bus by ourselves (no tour or anything). The girl at the bus station was very helpful, so we felt we knew what we were doing. We knew we got on the correct bus, but then it got confusing as hell because the names of the stops didn’t exactly correspond to the names on the schedule we had. Huh? But soon we were taking the road down the side of a hill, with a view overlooking vast green vineyards, and we knew we’d made it to Bech-Kleinmacher. After we got off the bus, on a quiet road in the village, we noticed some tents set up behind a building and heard voices. We decided to check it out and discovered something wonderful.
It was a small community cook-out going on, a grillfescht (I’m guessing that’s in Luxembourgish). We hadn’t been on the lookout for food that was uniquely Luxembourgish, and now here we were, in the countryside, with a bunch of locals, eating and having a relaxing Sunday afternoon. Fabulous!
The first thing I did was get a few glasses of local wine from the drink stand– the sparkling wine Cremant and a rose’. We noticed they were serving a sausage mysteriously named ping-pongs wupp, so of course we had to try it (I’m not sure how I ordered it without cracking up).
Here’s our sausage with our glasses of wine. Classy, no? It was a pork sausage and I seem to remember it was good, seasoned but not spicy. Since the sign also says Thüringer, I guess it was this.
J also got a massive pork cutlet with fries. I only had a few bites of it, but the crispy pork was yummy.
Our bellies full, we walked across the village to the Wellenstein vineyard and wine cellars. It was a pretty typical wine tour. Our tour guide reminded J of Walter Mathau and made a lot of corny jokes. The tour was, of course, followed by a tasting.
The specialty of this area is the sparkling wine Cremant. The Cremant Brut we tasted at the very end was really nice. A few of the wines we had were too sweet, but the Cremant was dry, with a slightly rubbery smell and a medium amount of bubbles. We bought quite a few bottles before catching the bus back to Luxembourg City and after that, the train back to Brussels.
[...] wines for the evening were from Luxembourg, which made me think of the time we visited a Luxembourgian winery. I stuck with the white, which was crisp and pleasant but got a little warm sitting on the table. [...]