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“O whare will I get a skeely skipper

To sail this new ship of mine?”

O up and spake an eldern knight,

Sat at the king’s right knee:

“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor

That ever saild the sea.”

King Alexander III of Scotland had no successor in Scotland, and therefore he gave instructions that his young granddaughter, the Maid of Norway, should be brought back to Scotland. According to Child Ballad number 58, “Sir Patrick Spens,” he instructs Sir Patrick to set out immediately, accompanied by a group of Scottish lords, and bring her back. The knight is flattered but very apprehensive, since it is the dead of winter and the sea is treacherous, but he naturally bows to the will of his king. Once in Norway, he falls out with some Norwegian lords, who accuse the Scots of draining away the wealth of the Norwegian king, and in anger Sir Patrick orders the ships to be put ready for departure the following morning. He is warned of the danger of this by one of his sailors:

I saw the new moon late yestreen

Wi’ the auld moon in her arm;

And if we gang to sea, master,

I fear we’ll come to harm.

And of course, they do: in spite of all attempts by the sailors to save the ship, it goes down. The ballad ends:

O forty miles off Aberdeen

‘Tis fifty fathoms deep,

And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,

Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.

The tale told in the ballad, which supposedly took place in 1290, is just that: a tale. However, Alexander’s penchant for wine is fully documented: in 1253, for example, he took delivery of a hundred casks. But what wine was it? By the last few de cades of the thirteenth century, Scottish merchants were sailing directly to the city of Bordeaux, the capital of Gascony, an English possession since 1152 through the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Scotland and England were not yet mortal enemies—this developed after the death of Alexander—and the Scots sailed out of English ports as well as out of Leith (the port for Edinburgh); they landed in Gascony in safety. The best wine of Gascony came from the upper reaches of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, primarily from areas near Cahors, Gaillac, and Bergerac, and it was probably this wine that the king drank.

But what was this wine like? It was a thinnish, light-colored, extremely young wine, shipped almost immediately after its fermentation had been completed. Not surprisingly, it was drunk up very quickly lest it turn sour, since by the following summer it would not be worth drinking. Attempts were made to rescue the wine by sweetening it, but although this might change the taste, it did nothing to improve the quality. Calling this wine “blude-red” can only be termed an extreme example of poetic license.

What are the musical grapes of Weingarten?

THERE MAY BE more rarefied topics than the regional economics of medieval and early modern viticulture in what is now Bavaria … but none springs immediately to mind. On the one hand, there is the assertion that wine was generally reserved for the landlords and the monastic foundations who actually owned the vines, while the locals made do with beer. On the other hand, there are clear indications that winemaking supported local economies: on the slopes of the Schoenbuch, below the Grafenburg, monks from Ottobeuren had been practicing viticulture since the late twelfth century and the nearby village of Kayh was doing very well—witness the mighty wine press and the prosperous Rathaus, or town hall. But when they moved to orchards and cider making in the mid-1600s, their prosperity went on the slide.

But whatever side you take, it seems certain that wine must play a more than trivial role in your economy if you choose to name your community Vineyard—or, in this case, Weingarten, an abbey (and, since 1865, the name of the town) standing on the Martinburg.

Weingarten lies some twelve miles northeast of the Bodensee, the farthest southeasterly outpost of the Baden region. The first surviving records of the name occur in abbey records from 1123, though it had