Tuniberg

In our effort to give him much needed quality time with kids his age, Elias started a five-day "Bernd Voss Fussball Camp" today in Opfingen. By this evening, he was well exercised, tired, and quite happy.

Opfingen is one of a handful of small communities incorporated into Freiburg yet situated several kilometers to the west along the Tuniberg, a sizable hill terraced with vineyard after flourishing vineyard. While Elias was learning new soccer moves, I jogged from Opfingen north around the Tuniberg to Gottenheim, then walked back over the hill, enjoying in the views of grapes and the mountains beyond. In July, when we stayed in Waltershofen (one town north of Opfingen, also part of the Freiburg municipality), all of the grapes on the Tuniberg were green. They have since ripened into purple, red, and yellow-green clusters, and the season of new-wine fests is upon us.

The local wines are quite delectable. With Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache enthusiasm, I've been describing them to people here as tasting like the local dialect sounds: "leicht und knusprig" (light and crisp). This generally elicits skeptical looks, perhaps because most folks here haven't spent a lot of time listening to the extended diphthongs of Bo'arisch (Bairisch), where a simple three-letter word might be drawn out into a four- or five-letter one without a second thought (e.g. turning "gut" into "gu'at[h]"). Bavarian sounds more like a full-bodied red might taste, in contrast to the airy Spaetburgunder flavor of the Badisch dialect. My word choice is possibly also confusing because "knusprig" means "crispy" as well as "crisp," which might evoke images of words and wines infused with rice crispies. Nonetheless, I stand by my choice of adjectives.

As my friend Melissa points out, molted cicada shells are also light and crispy. For those who find that analogy helpful, I would suggest that full-bodied reds are the whole cicada: more than you'd necessarily want to encounter on a warm summer evening. With Badisch Spaetburgunders, you get to appreciate all the essential features of the cicada, without the undesirable heaviness of the squishy parts.

But back to the Tuniberg. In the Google Earth image below, you can see the entire hill (my trot covered only the north end). The Rhine river curves into the left of the image, about 8.5 km west of Opfingen as the cicada flies.