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In May 1832, roughly 30,000 people climbed the hill above Neustadt an der Weinstrasse to the ruined Hambach Castle and demanded constitutional government and a unified Germany. The Hambacher Fest was one of the largest political demonstrations in German history to that point, and it happened here, in the middle of the Palatinate wine country, because this is the kind of place where people feel emboldened by landscape and by good wine. The castle still stands above the vineyards, restored and now a museum dedicated to that moment when political idealism met the spring sunshine of the Pfalz.

Neustadt calls itself the wine capital of Germany with some justification: it sits at the center of the Palatinate wine region, surrounded by 2,200 hectares of vines that produce everything from bone-dry Riesling to rich Spatburgunder.

Every autumn the Deutsche Weinlesefest crowns the German Wine Queen in a tradition that goes back to 1929. The old town around the 14th-century collegiate church has kept its medieval proportions, and the Palatinate Forest begins immediately west of the city, the largest contiguous forest area in Germany, where you can disappear into the pine and oak for hours and come back out at a wine estate for the evening.