Kaiserstuhl: Workers discover decades

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Johannes Freiherr von Gleichenstein with one of the recently discovered wine bottles

Photo: Philipp von Ditfurth / dpa

During renovation work in a wine cellar in the Kaiserstuhl, 37 hidden bottles with drops from the 1970s were discovered.

Buried with the wine was also a message in a bottle that three men had addressed to posterity, as owner Johannes Freiherr von Gleichenstein told the dpa news agency.

First the "Badische Zeitung" reported on the find.

The three men dug a tunnel between two wine cellars on the estate in Vogtsburg around 50 years ago, reports Gleichenstein.

The workers hid their alcoholic greeting to posterity in the ground - and the message in a bottle.

The letter says: "If the wine is found, the builders ask for news." One of the three tunnel builders has since died, said Gleichenstein.

He contacted the others as requested.

You would have been very happy.

The men saw their treasure as a kind of historical document, "so that at some point you will remember who laboriously dug the tunnel back then," says Gleichenstein.

Now the tunnel has been widened to make room for a further 140,000 liters of wine.

The wine bottles buried as a kind of time capsule in the 1970s emerged.

Most of the bottles found go into the in-house wine archive, as the winemaker said.

But he wants to open a few soon and try the old drops with his family and employees.

mak / dpa