The Rhine does not look like a border from a vineyard. Stand on the German side, in Baden, and the river is simply the far edge of the view: more vines, a treeline, hills doing what hills do on both banks at once. The line on the map that separates Germany from France runs straight through a landscape that has never much cared where it was drawn.

I have German roots, and I have spent years traveling through this country—touring vineyards, following family records, tracing ancestors back through small towns and church records. It is one of the few places in the world where I do not feel taller or bigger than everyone else, where the scale of the landscape matches the scale of my own body. That belonging matters. It shapes how you taste.

Students met this landscape once already, from the other side. Week 19 spent time in Alsace, tasting Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris off limestone soil under a French label. Baden grows the same family of grapes, a few miles east, off soil that has nothing to do with limestone at all.

Germany is known abroad for sweeter wines that royal families across Europe sought after for centuries. There is truth in that history. But there is also much more to learn here: many indigenous dry wines worth your time, and a culture of hospitality that sits at the table with strangers as though they were neighbors. Germans eat at long tables with friends and whoever walks through the door, and I love this openness. Wine tastes better when it is poured into that kind of generosity.

The reason sits underfoot. The Kaiserstuhl, Baden's best-known vineyard hill, is an extinct volcano. Its soil is dark, mineral-dense, and holds heat the way limestone never does, releasing it slowly back into the vines through the evening. Alsace, across the water, is built on the pale, cool limestone that gives its wines their characteristic lift and restraint.

Same grape family. Same river valley, technically. Two entirely different answers to what that grape becomes.

A Region Shaped by Warmth

Baden is Germany's southernmost wine region and its warmest, tucked against the Black Forest with the kind of sun exposure most German regions do not get. Where German wine's reputation abroad still leans on cool-climate Riesling, Baden has spent decades proving the country can ripen red and fuller-bodied white grapes with real conviction: Spatburgunder (Pinot Noir), Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris), and this week's grape, Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc).

The Burgunder family name is not incidental. It is the German acknowledgment that these are Burgundian grapes, the same ones grown across Alsace and, further back still, in Burgundy itself. What Baden brings is not a different grape. It is a warmer answer.

What Actually Matters

You do not need to memorize the Kaiserstuhl's geology to taste what it does. You need one question: does this wine feel like it grew somewhere cool, or somewhere warm? Cooler sites give lift, restraint, a wine that stays narrow through the finish. Warmer sites give roundness, a wine that spreads out and stays a while. Baden, more often than not, answers warm.

That single question travels well beyond Germany. It is the same question worth asking of any bottle from any region, before the label tells you anything else.

• Tuesday goes deeper into Weissburgunder itself.
• Thursday, the chicken and leek pie is built precisely for a wine with weight enough to meet it.