Bacchus-Vinothek

„No wine grows in the Black Forest." Michael Grimm hears that sentence often, and it is how he likes to begin his story. His forebears were barrel coopers for five generations; his grandfather Severin founded a cooperage in Rottweil in 1933 and traded in wine even then, and his mother turned the „Grimmes Stüble" into a wine restaurant. When the wooden barrel went out of fashion in the early eighties, he trained not as a barrel cooper but as a wine-trade cooper, studied beverage technology in Geisenheim and added a degree in oenology in Gießen.

From 1991 to 1995 he worked for the Mövenpick wine cellars in Stuttgart – that is where he came to know Bordeaux and California. In 1995 he and his wife Nina bought a small wine business specialising in Bordeaux: the Bacchus-Vinothek. Two thousand bottles, a few shelves and a floppy disk holding some 900 customer addresses arrived in an overloaded van in Wellendingen near Rottweil, in a disused sewing workshop.

Today the range holds more than 2,500 different wines and champagnes, and around 200,000 bottles lie in fully climate-controlled storage, some of them still in Bordeaux. Over 700 of them come from Bordeaux, more than 500 from California. What is missing is missing on purpose: he stocks what he knows. Grimm travels to Bordeaux several times a year and to California once or twice; he has known some estates for more than 25 years.

And that is why the wine shop is in my guide: Rottweil sits on the eastern edge of the Black Forest, and here is someone who knows two of the world's great wine regions as well as his own street. If you are standing at the door, take time for the conversation – the rest follows. Saturdays are closed; that is the only trap.