The names refer to the sheaves of wheat (Strausse) or the brooms (Besen) which are hung outside to indicate the establishment is open. And that’s important, because these places only operate seasonally, depending on whether the winemaker has the time, or the personnel.

This one was at Griestal, south of Freiburg down in the Rhine corridor, on the western flank of the Black Forest (griestal-strausse.de). Finding it, hidden as it was amongst head high sweetcorn fields, wasn’t easy.

Griestal looks like a converted barn, with a lot of tables outside under a large retractable roof. On a summer evening it felt like a celebration, a festive gathering of families and locals. Many of the tables were fashioned out of old cable drums, and were shared between groups, so there was plenty of communication, especially once the first glasses of wine had been consumed.

On the winelist were Muller Thurgau and Weisser Burgunder at £3 for a large glass. Both made very pleasant drinking. And on the menu was inexpensive local food such as Brägele (£4.75), a local equivalent of Swiss rosti, and a plate of Käsespätzle (£11.20), small macaroni-like pasta smothered in cheese and topped with caramelised onions. It was not haute cuisine, but certainly good fodder for working in the fields.

All in all, a highly recommended experience.

Let’s face it, the popular tourist destination of Baden-Württemberg is a helluva mouthful for non-German-speaking visitors. It has a poor brand profile on the international market, and it doesn’t have much recognition factor either. You might know (part of) it better as the Black Forest. In fact, most visitors to the Black Forest will know nothing of Baden-Württemberg.

Another very popular region, the Rhineland-Palatinate, is a bit of a challenge, too, sounding like a cross between a type of rock and a metro station.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is even worse. It sounds like a disease that horses might get.

But these are key tourism destinations in Germany; besides the Black Forest, Baden-Württemberg has automotive capital Stuttgart, lovely vineyards and ancient cities like Heidelberg. Happily the regional tourism board has appreciated the problem and substituted a couple of new names for the ‘official’ title, calling the region variously ‘Southwest Germany’, which is rather nebulous, and the ‘Sunny Side of Germany’, which seems like they’re trying harder.

Meanwhile Rhineland-Palatinate, a region to the north of B-W which includes the lovely Mosel valley and the vineyards and castles of the Rhine, has subtitled itself as ‘Romantic Germany’, which just about works, although it is pretty unhelpful when you try to find it on a map.

Over in the east, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is one of Germany’s biggest landes covering a huge area north of Berlin which includes extensive lakeland and Germany’s most striking coastline, all the way along the Baltic Sea. Its official translated name is ‘Mecklenburg Western Pomerania’, but that clearly is no help at all, so it has taken to subtitling itself the ‘Best of Northern Germany’. Or even just ‘MeckPomm’ to its friends.

And that, in the end, may be the way ahead. If Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is MeckPomm, then Rhineland-Palatinate could be RhinePal, which means Baden-Württemberg becomes… BadWürt. Ah well, two of three ain’t bad.

It is a well-known fact – and oft-repeated one at this time of year – that the tradition of the Christmas tree came from Germany. Along with several other bits and bobs of Christmas.

But for Germans, the tree is not just for Christmas: it represents a whole national psyche wrapped up in a forest. This is a country which attaches a huge significance to woodland. Furthermore, perhaps surprisingly given its significant industrialisation and its big population, one third of Germany’s land area (11.4 million hectares) still remains covered by trees, which makes it one of the most densely wooded countries in Europe.

Some of the afforestation will be familiar territory to tourists: the Black Forest, the Harz Mountains, and probably also the Eifel, but actually the densest woodland areas are in the Rhineland Palatinate and Hesse, where 42 percent of the land area is covered by trees.

Hesse also happens to be Brothers Grimm country, and anyone familiar with the stories will know how often they feature woodland, getting lost in forests, and of course worthy woodcutters, who are almost always the apogee of honest folk. The landscape around the ‘Sleeping Beauty castle’ (Donröshenschloss) Sababurg not far from Kassel in Hesse includes the Urwald section of the giant Reinhardswald forest, a place where you can really suspend your disbelief whilst wandering through a cathedral of beech trees and giant anthropomorphically-shaped oaks, some of which are over a thousand years old.

In fact oak and beech historically should be the most common species of tree in Germany, but pressure on the forest industry and the need for fast growth means that these slow movers have been superseded by spruce, so now only 40 percent is deciduous.

But woodland still has its hold over the German soul. You’ve only got to glance at German culture: Wagner operas are full of gloomy forest, and Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely figures are forever depicted looking out over or standing amongst lonely woodland; search for him on Google images and you’d think you’d stumbled into Tolkein country.

For artists, trees are seen as a poetic bridge between heaven and earth, but they also play other symbolic roles in daily German life. At Easter, many people decorate living trees with eggs. On the first of May, villages erect tall maypoles made from the trunks of firs. And some builders still place a small tree on the roof as a topping-out symbol on a completed house.

If ever there was any doubt that the German forest remains a place of mystery and of quest, you’ve only got to look at the column inches that the recent ‘Forest Boy’ story generated, when a teenage boy wandered into Berlin, claiming to have been living in the woods for so long that he no longer knew who he was. The fact that he was so readily believed, and became such an overnight celebrity, is all about the perceived power of the forest.

This heartfelt exclamation coming from a native South Londoner behind me while cycling on a sunny spring day in the northern part of the Black Forest near the spa resort of Bad Wildbad makes a strange kind of sense: blue skies above, lush green around you, clean air in your lungs, it is the sort of enjoyable experience that lingers on in the mind long after returning to London’s dust and grime.

Bad Wildbad, around 40 miles from Stuttgart, is perhaps best known for its stunning bath complex, the Palais Thermal, built in the 19^th century in Moorish style and sometimes called ‘Germany’s Alhambra’, In recent years it has diversified into a range of saunas in addition to the original thermal water pools, but our bikes are evidence of the spa’s need to branch out even further.

Our seven-mile trip from the Sommerberg plateau, some 300 metres above Bad Wildbad’s Enztal valley, to nearby Kaltenbronn, proves to be particularly therapeutic, since we’re talking about e-bikes here. Bad Wildbad has, like so many other destinations in Germany, jumped on the electrical bikes wagon. After starting out at the end of 2009 with six bikes, visitors can currently rent from a selection of twelve with eight more on the way. The success is not just down to the general interest of cyclists tackling the Black Forest ups and downs whilst aided by a small engine.  Many users, so the local tourist office says, book a ride to decide if they might want to invest in an e-bike themselves. And at €9 for half a day and €16 for the entire day this is indeed a sensible option.

Initially sceptical about the e-bike craze in Germany, and as someone who likes to think their muscle power is still up to the task, I found the engine support rather pleasant, if not entirely necessary. The bikes let you choose from three levels and on level one there’s still enough cycling to be done by yourself while getting just that little bit of extra push for the hills.

There are good reasons for the emergence of e-bikes in Bad Wildbad. As a Kurbad, i.e. a spa resort in the German sense of the word with local mineral or thermal springs, it has traditionally attracted visitors since the 19^th century. Germans take the power of healing waters very seriously, and in Bad Wildbad the water is known to improve and cure ailments of the neuromuscular system and rheumatism.  However, times are changing and the famously generous German health system that paid for Kuren is withdrawing its support. Being prescribed a Kur by your doctor (for which you didn’t necessarily have to be ill, prevention will do) is becoming less likely, and as a consequence communities like Bad Wildbad need to find other ways of attracting visitors.

Apart from the e-bikes initiative, the local tourist board has just set up ‘Geocaching’ together with two neighbouring communities. This treasure 21^st century treasure hunt is carried out with a GPS device and its six different geocaching routes in the area are aimed at a younger visitor group.

As for us, we were very satisfied with our power-assisted bike trail, especially when it came to the stopover at the Grünhütte hut for some absolutely delicious (and gigantic!) pancakes with blueberries, enjoyed in the sunshine outside and located without the need for any GPS. Quality will always shine through.

For pictures of e-biking in Bad Wildbad, the Palais Thermal and – the pancake, click here.

Further information on Bad Wildbad

The Black Forest features in the childhood memories of hundreds of thousands of Germans as the place where they first strapped those long slidey things to their feet. There are at least a dozen mini ski resorts scattered through the mountains, ranging from Vogelskopf (one lift and a couple of pistes), to the slopes of Feldberg with 50km of downhill.  Most have a mixture of cross-country routes and pisted slopes, and they’re all within an hour’s drive of key airports like Freiburg, Basel (Switzerland), and Strasbourg (France). Each has a different, hand-crafted flavour, unlike the mass skiing destinations up in the Alps.

Those Alpine ski destinations have significant drawbacks which don’t necessarily feature in the brochures.  By committing yourself to a holiday up amongst Europe’s highest peaks, you are usually incarcerating yourself in a purpose-built (ie ugly) community where skiing is practically the only occupation on offer, and where the price of everything is suitably inflated. What happens if you don’t like it? You get tired of it? Or one of you gets injured? Too bad. You’re stuck in your mountain fastness for a week, and you’ll just have to grin and bear it, and watch others having fun while your cash drains away.

Feldberg is the main downhill resort

Not so in the Black Forest. Here the ski resorts are good value (the ADAC found that prices can be up to 50 percent cheaper than in the Alps) easy to drive to, and uncrowded. The region’s lower altitude (highest point just 1,493 metres, compared to Alpine resorts which start at 2,000 metres plus) will ensure that the temperature is warmer, although that can mean a shortage of snow. It is a destination for shorter stays and last-minute decisions, and for people who want to mix skiing with other activities.

The Feldberg mountain hosts the main resort, with 28 lifts and a World Cup run. A lift pass here is €28 a day (expect to pay at least €10 more in the Alps), and at the weekends it can get busy with groups of students and young adults, doing skiing on the cheap. There’s bunkhouse style accommodation for the groups, but for the most part skiers stay in typically handsome Black Forest farmhouse and guest house accommodation, where prices are unlikely to be more than €30 per person, B&B.

Within easy reach are the airport towns, Basel, Freiburg and Strasbourg, each with good stuff to see. Then there’s Donaueschingen, the pretty Black Forest village at the start of the Danube. Stuttgart, home to Mercedes Benz and Porsche. The Hohenzollern castles at Hechingen and Sigmaringen, and the cuckoo clock industry around Furtwangen. There’s plenty to do.

If you prefer your skiing to be more demanding, but still German, see our page on Germany’s Alpine resorts. And there are other ski destinations further north at Sauerland, in the Harz Mountains and over in the Ore Mountains and in Thuringia.

Official Black Forest wintersports site

It is a bit of a misnomer, the Black Forest, because it is neither black, even barely dark green, and not a lot of it is forest, at least compared to how it used to be. It’s a region of relatively low-lying, low-slung tree-covered mountains which gets a fair bit of snow in winter, and a fair bit of sun in summer. Its topography means that it has managed to avoid over-industrialisation, and to keep its crafts, costumes and traditions relatively intact, in part helped to do so by the tourist market.

It covers a mountainous part of Baden-Württenberg 200km long and 60km wide which runs close to the borders with France and Switzerland (and is therefore particularly attractive tourist destination for the Swiss and the French, too). The Romans were the first to refer to the region’s then dark and dense forest as ‘Silva Nigra’ (black forest), although deforestation, agriculture and mild urbanisation have thinned out the woods a lot since.

Famous for ham, for gateau, and for cuckoo clocks

The northern part, south of the spa resort of Baden-Baden, consists of high plateaus (usually between 800 and 1,000 metres), while the highest mountains are in the southern part, rising to the Feldberg at 1,493 metres. There are mineral spas and lakes regularly distributed at various levels, of which the most popular is the attractive-sounding Lake Titisee.

Famous for ham, for gateau, and for cuckoo clocks, it’s a region of striking scenery where the farmhouses are very handsomely maintained, villages are splendidly neat, old and clean, and traditional costumes are widely displayed. There’s a bit of skiing in winter, and lots of excellent driving, walking or hiking trails in the hills during spring and summer. Most trails are well supplied with places to rest and refresh, all in the name of good health. So what’s not to like? Well, some Germanophiles find it simply too popular, because the Black Forest is the British coach tour destination par excellence.

It is easy enough to avoid the crowds. Most tours schedule some of their journey along the Black Forest High Road (Schwarzwaldhochstrasse), which runs between Baden-Baden in the north and Freudenstadt in the south. There are magnificent views of the Black Forest valleys, the Rhine Valley and Alsace and the Vosges Mountains along the entire route.

But you can get equally good views on foot, for the region is criss-crossed by well-signposted trails that allow walkers to reach areas and vistas often inaccessible by car, including castle ruins and waterfalls. Of the long-distance hiking trails, the most celebrated is the Westweg, running the length of the forest from Pforzheim to Basel via Mummelsee, Hausach, Titisee and Feldbach. It covers 280km, and makes for a fine fortnight’s walk for a moderately fit person.

If you’d rather have your forest free of Brits, however, then consider the Bavarian Forest, which is almost as big, and in the same climactic zone, but this time over on Germany’s eastern border, next to the Czech Republic.

Black Forest Tourism.

For airline tickets to Black Forest gateways (ie Stuttgart, Freiburg, Strasbourg, Basel) go to www.flighthub.com

Famously, and mistakenly, attributed to the Swiss, the cuckoo clock was actually ‘invented’ in Germany’s Black Forest, and has remained largely unchanged in its basic design for the last 200 years. Today the Black Forest town of Furtwangen, which saw the opening of the first Clockmakers School in the mid 19^th century, is home to the German Clock and Watch Museum, and is widely accepted as the centre of the modern cuckoo clock industry.

There have been plenty of sporadic examples of mechanical clocks with bird or animal figures way back through recorded history. A Greek mathematician reportedly created one in the 2^nd century BC, but the first known record of a mechanical cuckoo marking the hours on a clock is from Germany, in 1629, and it belonged to royalty from Saxony.

Largely unchanged in its basic design for the last 200 years

How the design came to the Black Forest is not known, but a cottage industry of clockmaking in carved wood had taken root in the region as a result of the ready availability of wood and of painstaking labour to carve it, particularly during the winter time when farmers and their wives had little else to do during the long hours of darkness. So by the middle of the 18th century, several small clockmaking shops were producing cuckoo clocks.

The design was simple enough. A carved wooden house contained the mechanism, worked by a pendulum, with a bird on a spring, and a two note cuckoo call produced by a little set of bellows and a pipe. Over the centuries there have been various styles of exterior decoration reflective of the artistic movements of the time, making them eminently collectable, but the cuckoo call has been essentially unvaried since the 18^th century. If the bird could have somehow claimed its performance rights, then it would no doubt be able to afford a home of its own, and not to have to continue to usurp those of others.

These days many clocks now have a quartz mechanism rather than a mechanical one, and you can often tell the difference through the cuckoo call, which is a recording, and often backed up by a plashing waterfall or some such idyll of nature.

A substantial industry in the region still produces mechanical cuckoo clocks, at a rate of hundreds of thousands a year, although you do need to be careful you’re not being fooled into purchasing a cheap import. Four of the biggest cuckoo clocks in the world (the largest being 4.5 metres square) are also located here, in the villages of Höllsteig, Niederwasser, Schonach, and Schonachbach.

To check whether your cuckoo clock is locally made, see if the manufacturer (or the shop) belongs to the Black Forest Clock Association.

Furtwangen’s German Clock and Watch Museum.

It may end up as the longest river in continental Europe, but the Danube starts small at a spring in the heart of the small Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, and doesn’t become navigable until the city of Ulm, a distance of roughly 200km. Accordingly this first stretch of stripling waterway does not figure widely in tour operator brochures, which tend to focus on big river cruises, and yet it is one of the prettiest waterside routes in Germany, ideal for cycling.

Donaueschingen is a handsome little place, and its celebrated Danube (Donau) spring bubbles out of the ground between the town’s palace and its brewery. These days it has been railed in to make a little pool surrounded with balustrades which tourists treat as a wishing well, throwing coins into the water.

After just 20 km it vanishes completely

Shadowed by the cycle route which goes all the way to Budapest, the river sets off full of hope, initially through parkland and water meadows, but then after just 20 km it vanishes completely near the village of Immendingen into an underground system of watercourses, leaving behind a weedy, puddled riverbed which only really flows during seasons of heavy rain and melting snow.

Fortunately this weedy bed is slowly refilled by tributaries, and then for the next 30 kilometres the re-born river wanders mazily through lovely pastoral landscape of fruit orchards and cattle grazing, burrowing through a limestone gorge in the southernmost skirts of the Swabian Alb. A lot of the riverbank land hereabouts is owned by the very prosperous Benedictine abbey at Beuron, with its fabulously decorated baroque church, and abbey produce – particularly meat – on sale in abbey shops.

Beuron is the first of several major abbeys that line the river, and the next town, Sigmaringen, is the setting for its first major castle, a Hohenzollern property stuck dramatically up on a riverside rock, where the Nazi-controlled French Vichy government was incarcerated during the Second World War.

At the next, very pretty, town of Riedlingen, whose main square is lined with ancient, slightly wonky, half-timbered and gabled houses, there’s a choice of routes: sticking to the river for the straight run into Ulm, or diverting up the Ach valley to the resort town of Blaubeuren, where the river Blau emerges dramatically from a giant hole in the ground.

The Blau meets the Danube at Ulm, the first big city on the Danube, whose cathedral has the tallest church spire in Europe at 161 metres. From Ulm downriver there are more castles, monasteries and notable cities, but now that the river is navigable, mainstream tourism kicks in. Upstream of Ulm a river-following cyclist is in his or her own world; below Ulm, he or she will begin to meet up with others, and then from Passau, to blend with the crowds.

Plenty of organisations (see our Tour Operator pages) offer packages along the Danube Cyclepath (Donau Radweg), but route finding is a doddle, and there are plenty of bike-friendly guest houses, so it is just as easy to organise it yourself. A handy guide is The Danube Cycleway, published by Cicerone.

Andrew Eames’s book about travelling the Danube, Blue River Black Sea, is available from Amazon.