single vineyard (also Im Röttgen) in the municipality of Winningen (Burg Cochem area) in the German Moselle wine-growing region. The name is derived from the dialect "Rödchen" (a "small clearing"). The site is relatively young. Prussian soldiers lying in Koblenz had turned a large rock into a vineyard at the request of the mayor of Winningen. White pebbles embedded in one of the many dry stone walls of the "Röttgen" indicate the year of its creation as 1822. The well-known vineyard owner Johann Philipp Bronner (1792-1864) described the site some ten years after its completion full of admiration and enthusiasm as follows: Blasted by powder, and worked by many helping hands in such a way that the whole now forms an excellent vineyard, which was, as it were, wrested from nature by art and human hands. To the passing traveller it seems incomprehensible how these individual parcels of land can be scattered between rocks and often not at all coherent, only cultivated or provided with fertiliser and the like, since they do not seem to be connected with each other at all, but art has conquered all of nature's obstacles.
The location offers an impressive picture. Separated from the Moselle only by the main road and the railway line, small and tiny terraces grow out of the rock like swallows' nests and climb up the vineyard for about 100 metres. The vineyard, which faces south to east, is 75 to 180 metres above sea level and has a slope of 40 to 75%. It covers almost 12 hectares of vineyards on stony Devonian slate weathered soil, some of which has red and blue hues. Riesling is almost exclusively cultivated here. Shares in the site are held, for example, by the Freiherr von Heddesdorff, Fries Reiner, Heymann-Löwenstein, Knebel Beate, Kröber Rüdiger and Richter Richard wineries.
Image: VDP
