Eighty kilometres of towpath and one closed bridge

The vines on the Bremmer Calmont go up at sixty-five degrees and they are being picked by four people on ropes, which is a sentence I would not have believed before I stood at the bottom of it with a rucksack and watched them work. This is the steepest vineyard in Europe by most reckonings. The harvest here is done by hand because no machine will hold the slope, and it is done in the second half of October because that is when the grapes are ready, and the towpath below is empty because the cycling season ended three weeks ago.

I walked from Trier to Cochem over six days, which is not far — roughly eighty kilometres of river with a good deal of meandering added by the geography — and the whole point of doing it slowly in October is that the two things that make the valley famous are both happening at once and nobody is there to see either.

The path

There are two routes. The towpath proper runs along the water, flat, hard-surfaced, shared with cyclists, and covers the distance without ever making you work. The Moselsteig runs up on the valley sides, is properly waymarked, and climbs and descends something like three hundred metres between most pairs of villages.

I had intended to do the high route and did about a third of it. The towpath is better than its reputation and it puts you at the level of the working river: the barge traffic, the locks, the ferries, the men fishing who all want to know where you started that morning. The high route gives you the view of it. Alternating between the two on alternate days turned out to be the right answer and was not my plan.

The Moselsteig is signposted to a standard that makes a paper map feel like an affectation. It is worth carrying one anyway, for the one afternoon the signs are facing the wrong way after roadworks.

What is shut

From the second week of October the valley begins closing. Not all at once and not evenly: the pattern seems to be that the places dependent on cyclists shut first, the places dependent on coach parties shut a fortnight later, and the places that are really the village pub with rooms above do not shut at all.

Two consequences. The first is that you must book ahead, and you must book by telephone, because a substantial number of these places take their online listings down for the winter and answer the phone anyway. Twice I was told there was no room by a booking site and then given one by the person who picked up.

The second is that the day's walking has to be planned around where lunch actually exists. I went hungry on the fourth day between Zell and Beilstein, having assumed that a village of that size on a river of that popularity would produce something at one in the afternoon on a Monday in October. It produced a bakery that had closed at noon.

The closed bridge

Halfway along the walk the road bridge I had planned to cross was out for repair, with a diversion of eleven kilometres by road and no pedestrian alternative. The small passenger ferry that would ordinarily have solved this had finished its season on the last Sunday of September.

What solved it was standing on the bank looking obviously stuck, at which point a man with a fibreglass dinghy and an outboard took me across for the price of a beer he then refused to be bought. I mention this not as advice — it is not advice — but because it is the third time on that walk that a problem was solved by somebody who had watched me fail to solve it and could not stand to keep watching.

Wine, since you will be asked

Almost every producer in the valley will pour for you if you knock, in October, because they are at home and the tasting room is empty. Several will not charge, which puts you under an obligation you should discharge by buying a bottle even if you are carrying it forty kilometres. Ask for the dry ones by name; the assumption that a foreign visitor wants the sweet wine is entrenched and the growers themselves mostly drink the other thing.

You will be offered new wine, cloudy and half-fermented, which is delicious, is about four per cent alcohol, and continues to ferment inside you if you have more than two glasses of it in the afternoon before a hill.