A restaurant called Marktwirt is just a hundred steps or so northwest from the centre of the Viktualienmarkt. The Viktualienmarkt itself hosts a few shops with serious assortments of wine and cheese. It’s also hard to miss the Nymphenburg Sekt Cafe. Nymphenburg Sekt is a Bavarian sparkling wine producer. I do not know of any serious vineyards around Munich.  There are certainly no grapes growing around the former hunting grounds of the Bavarian nobility in Nymphenburg. Nymphenburg Sekt admits on its website that their stuff is made from grapes (do they mean bulk wine?) collected from all around Europe. The Sekt Crystal Cabinet is competitively priced and trocken. Trocken is the German for dry, which is the third-sweetest type of sparkling wine (17-32 g or residual sugar per litre), which means you’ll find it rather sweet. Cabinet is a label word that doesn’t mean anything. The premium sparkling wine from the house of Nymphenburg is called Koenig Ludwig II. Koenig Ludwig II was the eccentric King of Bavaria from 1864-1886. Among other things, he is responsible for the fairy-tale Schloss Neuschwanstein, which inspired the castle of the beast in Disney’s …

Are there good wine bars in Munich? Why would you expect any? When a wine map of Germany includes Munich it’s only because Germany’s second smallest wine region in Saxony is also on the map. And since that’s also so far-out to the east it makes sense to include Munich, straight down 400 km to the south. The two closest wine regions to Munich are Baden and Württemberg. It’s not clear which of the two is closer. Esslingen in Württemberg is about 200 km away to the north-west. Meersburg of Baden is about 200 km away to the south-west. London and Paris have vineyards close by. Stanlake Park is an hour by train from Paddington (ca. 50 km) while Paris has its own vineyards (Clos Montmartre). In the 16th century, Munich’s rulers from the House of Wittelsbach brought in wine — 40,000 litres or so — from Regensburg (ca. 100 km north). Regensburg had a serious wine-scene at the time developing out of vineyards held by local monasteries. Many of these were destroyed during the 30-years war (1618-1648). After the war beer replaced wine as …