The development of great export markets for Europe’s most venerated wine regions depended critically on transport. In some cases, such as the Bordeaux area or the Moselle Valley, fine wines could be exported by boat. But other wine-producing regions relied primarily on railways.
The Rioja area of northern Spain only shot to prominence in the second half of the 19th century when a new railway was constructed, connecting the wine estates by the Rio Oja and the Rio Ebro with the busy port of Bilbao. Although the Tokaj region of north-east Hungary has an illustrious tradition of wine-making which long predates the advent of the railway, it was the energetic extension of the Habsburg rail network in the late 19th century which made it possible for even smallscale Tokaj wineries to ship their wines to distant cities. In this special feature for hidden europe, the magazine’s editors reveal some of their favourite wine-themed rail excursions.
The Napa to St Helena railway — completed 150 years ago in early 1868 — was never really a money-spinner. At least, not until 1987, when Californian entrepreneur Vincent DeDomenico had the smart idea of creating an upmarket package for those wanting to see Napa’s celebrated vineyards from a train. The idea did not go down well with Napa winemakers.
At McKinstry Street Station, passengers are lining up to board the mid-morning train to nowhere. Although the train will pass through a number of communities during its three-hour journey, nobody will board or alight along the way. The Napa Valley Wine Train is the ultimate tourist experience, one which insulates those on board the train from the places through which they pass. The train cruises slowly north right beside Highway 29, passing through Oakville and Rutherford to reach St Helena, which is 30 km up the valley from the McKinstry Street depot. The train then runs back down the valley to its starting point. Passengers pay between 150 and 250 US dollars (€120 to €200) for the round trip. The fare includes lunch, though the cost of any wines to accompany the meal is extra.
Herb Schmidt, one-time Vice-President of the famous Mondavi winery, captured the local mood in the early days of the Napa Valley Wine Train : “Their insistence that they’re a real train, simply because they have an engine, dining car and caboose, is absurd,” Schmidt said. “This really does not provide public transportation. It’s really, as some people would say, a restaurant on wheels rather than a train. Where’s the public good?”
In this article we shall explore European alternatives to the Napa model for wine-rail tourism, relying on examples from France, Hungary, Portugal and Spain.
Exploring Tokaj by train
The railway platforms at Szerencs are busy with passengers. The morning express to Budapest left about 10 minutes ago, and now there are three more trains due out in as many minutes. One will skirt the southern flank of the Zemplén Hills, pausing at the small station which serves the memorably named village of Mád, and then continuing on past the Pendits Winery where Hungarian vintner Márta Wille-Baumkauff and her son Stefan have brought assertive new style to the age-old traditions of the Tokaj region.
The next of those three trains out of Szerencs will run 46 kilometres up the Bodrog Valley, taking an hour for a journey which stops at eight different villages, all of them jealously protective of their reputations in the wine world. The train is pretty full, and many of those on board sit on the right where the morning mist is just clearing from meadows around the river. Those with a real interest in wine opt for the view to the left, ticking off the names of distinguished Tokaj vineyards as the train travels up the valley. The train runs as far as Sátoraljaújhely, just short of the border with Slovakia. It’s interesting how the ambition of rail operators often flags when the tracks reach a frontier.
Sátoraljaújhely is a town steeped in wine tradition (if somewhat blighted by some awful postwar housing). For those wanting some respite from wine, the town is home to one of Europe’s most remarkable exhibitions, housed in the Museum of the Hungarian Language in the Ferenc Kazinczy Memorial Park. Within a bold piece of modern architecture, the museum adventurously tackles an erudite and abstract topic. With a visit to the museum, followed by a few glasses of Tokaji wine, you might even be able to pronounce Sátoraljaújhely.
Finally, in that trio of departures from Szerencs, there is the local train to Tokaj itself, the village which has given its name to a wider wine region famed for its distinctive Tokaji Aszú sweet and semi-sweet wines. The journey to Tokaj takes just under 20 minutes, culminating in a wonderful stretch as the railway skirts a little Zemplén outlier, called Tokaji Hill. From the station at Tokaj, it’s a short walk to some of the greatest cellars of the region.
Those three rail routes radiating out from Szerencs cover between them the full extent of the region inscribed in 2002 on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The total distance by train, taking all three routes out and back, amounts to 190 kilometres. Those three journeys can be accommodated within a single day, and that still allows time for a couple of short walks or visits to wineries. The train fares are under €10 in all. And along the way, you’ll rub shoulders on the trains with villagers from the Tokaj region, some of whom will probably be surprised and delighted to find a visitor using the train to explore this deeply rural area of Hungary. It is an excursion which would surely please the man from Mondavi, for in the Tokaj region, unlike the Napa Valley, the trains are there first and foremost to serve local communities. Instead of the exclusive tourist venture in Napa, Tokaj offers a much more inclusive opportunity for travellers wanting to explore a wine region by train. Of course, you’ll have to bring your own lunch.
Rioja by rail
Except insofar as the Napa Valley Wine Train pulls a few sightseers out of their cars and onto the train, there’s no real environmental benefit associated with that train. Given that the railway line precisely parallels a main highway, it is not even as if the train passengers secure any better views of the vineyards than they would from a car.
Things are better in Rioja, where many of the region’s most distinguished vineyards and bodegas cluster around the railway line which runs along the Ebro Valley. Oddly the valley of the Rio Oja, which gave its name to this wine region in northern Spain, has far fewer vineyards than the much larger Ebro Valley.
Vineyards at Briones in Spain’s Rioja region (photo © Alexsalcedo / dreamstime.com).
The Sierra de Cantabria affords some protection from the north for the Ebro Valley downsteam from Miranda. With its benign climate, the Rioja region was surely destined for wine fame, but it came about almost by chance. A series of wine disasters in the Bordeaux region — first mildew in the late 1840s and 20 years later phylloxera — prompted wine merchants with palates attuned to claret to venture south into Spain to search for wines which might fill the gaps in the market.
The completion of the railway along the Ebro Valley in 1863 was perfectly timed to allow the Tempranillo wines of that region to be exported via Bilbao to northern markets. The Rioja region thus owes its status as a wine region of global importance to the railway, and the best way to get a good first impression of the regional landscape is still by train.
Three trains each day leave the railway junction at Miranda de Ebro (on the main line from the French border to Galicia and Portugal) and run down the Ebro Valley to Castejón and beyond. Even before the first stop at Haro, just 15 minutes down the line from Miranda, the train is running through a landscape dominated by vineyards. Haro rates as one of Europe’s finest wine towns, with some of the most distinguished Rioja merchants and shippers having warehousing and other facilities immediately around the station.
Our preferred way of seeing the Rioja region is to take first the train down the valley from Miranda to either Alfara or Castejón, transferring there onto one of the trains running back up the valley, travelling as far as Haro and staying overnight there. With its fine concentration of bodegas, most of them very willing to receive visitors, there is enough of interest to justify a two-night stay in Haro — which is a very much nicer place to stay than Logroño which, although a much larger town, is far less rooted in the wine trade.
Inland from Porto
Few railway stations are as welcoming as São Bento in Porto. The station’s main reception hall is decorated with exquisite azulejo tilework. Apart from the predictable representations of battles and courtly love, there are a number of scenes of rural life, including images of the grape harvest season in the Douro Valley. There is also a very fine frieze depicting the transport history of this area of northern Portugal, which — appropriately for an artwork commissioned by a railway company — shows how in the last quarter of the 19th century, the train eclipsed water transport in the Douro region.
The train still runs up the Douro Valley from Porto. After a day or two spent exploring the port lodges of Porto’s Vila Nova de Gaia district, it makes sense to travel upriver to explore the actual vineyards and quintas (wine estates). Logic might even suggest that the quinta visits should precede the Porto wine lodges, where the emphasis is on showcasing the wine rather than the terroir and landscapes which underpin the production of the Douro Valley’s distinguished fortified red wines.
Pocinho is a tiny community in the Douro Superior region, more protected from maritime influences and thus prone to extremes of temperature, where a new generation of vintners are making ripples in the market with their stunning unfortified wines.
A handful of trains each day leave São Bento for the three-and-a-half-hour journey to Pocinho, nowadays the eastern terminus of a railway which transformed the port trade. At one stage, the line extended east over the Spanish border, but that international link was severed in 1984, leaving only domestic services on the surviving line to Pocinho — a tiny community in the Douro Superior region, more protected from maritime influences and thus prone to extremes of temperature, where a new generation of vintners are making ripples in the market with their stunning unfortified wines.
The first part of the train ride east from Porto is unexceptional, with the railway ignoring the Douro Valley in favour of the River Sousa instead. But 80 minutes into the journey, the train moves decisively back to the Douro, sticking to the north bank of the river for the next hour and a half. Like all the European trains featured in this article, this is not a rail route designed with wine tourism in mind. It’s a year-round service which runs first and foremost to meet the needs of local communities.
The return journey from Porto to Pocinho can easily be accomplished in a day. Those with a greater appetite for local food than for train travel may wish to venture only as far as Pinhão (just two and half hours from Porto), and enjoy a leisurely lunch in the Rabelo restaurant of the riverside Vintage House Hotel, just a few steps from the railway station at Pinhão. Note that the hotel and its restaurant are closed in the winter months. The return train fare from Porto to Pinhão is €23; for the longer ride to the end of the line at Pocinho, a return ticket costs €27.
Although the rail trip makes an exceptional day excursion from Porto, dedicated devotees of port will surely want to stay longer. With the biggest concentration of top-class quintas in that stretch of the valley between Régua and Tua, Pinhão — which is midway between the two — makes a good base to explore a region which, with its harsh terrain, might not normally be seen as conducive to settlement. That it has developed over centuries into an epicentre of the fortified wine industry is a tribute to human ingenuity, judicious use of technology and overseas investors (mainly from England). It was in recognition of the Douro Valley’s seminal importance as a cultural landscape that in 2001 the region was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
Revisiting the Rhône
There was a time when all the main-line trains from Paris to the French Riviera relied on the railway which runs south along the Rhône Valley from Lyon to Valence and beyond. Nowadays the TGVs, in their headlong dash to sunny Provence, avoid the valley route and stick to a magnificently engineered high-speed line which tracks well east of the Rhône. There are a few glimpses of vineyards as the train streaks through Drôme and Vaucluse, yet this is not a line of any note for wine lovers. But the old line is still there. You’ll just need to forsake the TGV and rely on the regional trains which still leave Lyon once each hour and head south through Vienne to Valence. The trains are often busy on this route, much used by shoppers and commuters, and our experience is that few of those on board pay much attention to the passing landscape.
It is a line which would surely have appealed to Monsieur Pamplemousse. The author Michael Bond, who died last year and is much remembered for having invented (or discovered) Paddington Bear, indulged his interest in wine in his Monsieur Pamplemousse series which records the exploits of a restaurant inspector who roams France with a canine companion called Pommes Frites. Both Pamplemousse and the dog have a nose for fine wine and both know a claret from a Burgundy. Pommes Frites is a dog of conservative disposition who ventures only reluctantly beyond the big names of Bordeaux and Burgundy, but Monsieur Pamplemousse likes a good Rhône red, and Bond’s novels namecheck some of the outstanding wines from this region. At the Train Bleu restaurant at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, Monsieur Pamplemousse opts for a Côte Rôtie Les Jumelles. On another occasion Pamplemousse indulges in a Guigal Côte Rôtie Brune et Blonde.
The chapel in the vineyards above the River Rhône which lends its name to one of Paul Jaboulet’s famous Hermitage wines (photo © Chiyacat / dreamstime.com).
There was a spell when the vineyards at Côte Rôtie fell out of fashion. But over the last 40 years, the region has witnessed a sublime revival and, like the other famous appellations of the northern Rhône, it is an area perfectly tuned to rail travellers. The first 20 minutes from Lyon are unremarkable, but then, once past Vienne, there is a roll call of top-rate vineyards, mainly on the opposite bank of the river. First comes Côte Rôtie and then just a minute or two later there are the steep slopes on the far bank which are part of the Condrieu appellation, where so much has been done to revive the fortunes of the Viognier grape. If you know where to look, it is possible to pick out the fragment of land known as Château Grillet — a little enclave within the wider Condrieu area where the wines are so exceptional as to warrant their own appellation.
The railway then veers briefly away from the left bank of the river, with the view to the west now dominated by a nuclear power station, only for vineyards to reappear but now on the same bank of the river as the train. To the left, the land rises up to the village of Crozes-Hermitage, and then the train slows, skirting a hill topped by a small chapel. It is on these slopes that the grapes for Jaboulet’s Hermitage La Chapelle are cultivated, although recent vintages are perhaps not quite as majestic as those of a generation earlier. As if to encourage the wine novice, the names ‘Hermitage’ and ’Paul Jaboulet’ are spelled out in giant letters across the hillside.
This is one of Europe’s great rail-wine moments. But the real appeal of this Rhône excursion is the fabulous mix of wine estates seen in the one-hour journey from Lyon to Valence. It is the hilly nature of the terrain which underpins this.
Many readers might naturally have assumed we would nominate the railway which runs north from Bordeaux through the Médoc as a French wine tourism opportunity. This latter route is indeed an interesting journey, but the flatness of the terrain is such that it’s very hard to grasp any sense of the wider landscape. Some top châteaux are within a stone’s throw of the railway — including La Lagune, Prieuré-Lichine, Batailley — but there’s less sense of the sweep of the land and our most enduring memory of the journey is the view of the disused petrochemical plant at Pauillac.
Further afield
The wine-making regions of Europe and beyond are replete with other opportunities for combining railways with wine-related tourism. We could so easily have focused on a dozen other fine examples. The railway which runs west from Wiesbaden through the Rheingau bisects estates where some of the world’s best Riesling wines are made. And the railway line along the Italian coast south of Livorno affords superb views of the region, once so unfashionable, where fifty years ago this autumn the renaissance of the Tuscan wine industry started with the very first bottling of Sassicaia.
There are also missed opportunities in European wine tourism. The reopening, if ever it came to pass, of the railway which once ran east from Valladolid to Aranda, would create a remarkable opportunity for a 100-km long winefocused rail route. When this rail route was closed to passengers in 1985, the wider community of wine drinkers was barely aware of this Spanish section of the Duero Valley. Although there was a long vinicultural tradition — backed up by the strict wine ordinances introduced in Valladolid by Philip II in 1597 — few wines from the region ever featured on the international market. Today, the wines from Ribera del Duero challenge Rioja’s hegemony. Back in 1985, when the railway closed, there was just a score of bodegas in the Ribera del Duero. But that increased tenfold over the following 25 years, as investors and wine drinkers discovered that, even in this relatively cool region much prone to frosts, it was possible to make world-class wines. The great majority of the topclass properties abut onto or are within sight of the trackbed of the former railway.
In other cases, the rail infrastructure is still there, but simply not used. Perhaps the most striking example of a missed opportunity is in the Republic of Georgia, where the great majority of the country’s wine is produced in the Kakheti region. A railway runs along the southern flank of the Alazani Valley to the ancient walled city of Telavi, one-time capital of the former Kingdom of Kakheti. Telavi is today a Georgian wine hub, and the railway from the capital Tbilisi to Telavi passes, on the last 40 kilometres of the route, through several of the country’s most notable wine districts. These include Tsinandali, where Georgia’s finest white wines are produced, and several estates noted for the quality of their rich, red Saperavis. Here is an Old World region of very varied vineyards, strung out along a valley, with a railway running right through the heart of the wine producing area. The only problem is that there are no passenger trains on the railway to Telavi. If only there were, the train ride to Telavi would surely be the equal of the great wine rail routes of western Europe.
