75,000 merry wine tasters form 80km line

Press, 12 July 1984, Page 23

75,000 merry wine tasters form 80km line

NZPA-AP Neustadt, West Germany A merry line of 75,000 wine tasters has established a new mark for the “Guinness Book of Records” when they stretched out over 80km. As a prelude to its fiftieth anniversary next year, 160 colourful balloons barked the length of the “German Wine Road” which runs through the Haardt mountains of the wine-growing state of Rhineland-Pala-tinate from Bockenheim near Worms to Schweigen on the Franco-German border.

Brilliant sunshine, a rare occurrence this year, brought out locals, tourists and about 1000 Americans stationed in what is traditionally one of Western Europe’s largest ammunition depots and air defence training grounds.

a memento which local producers in the 35 towns and villages along the “Weinstrasse” filled up free of charge with the four main wine varieties grown in the region, second-largest of West Germany’s 11 winegrowing areas. “In July, 1935, a few men assembled around Josef Buerckel in the Inn to the Bavarian Hunter at the wine-growing town of Schweigen where they took the decision about which friends of wine and countryside are glad to this day,” a promotion bookled from the local winegrowers association said.

However, it failed to mention that Josef Buerckel was the region’s top Nazi leader, a friend of Adolf Hitler.