I was introduced to apple wine (in German apfelwein, but known locally as ebbelwoi) on my very first evening in Frankfurt. It was an experience, to say the least! A packed pub, various ways to order the drink, a less-than-friendly waiter – an eye-opener all round!

Eight years later and I think I’ve got it sussed.

First things first, you need to pick a pub. I’d suggest heading to Sachsenhausen, a district on the south side of the river, away from the centre, where you’ll have the biggest choice of apple wine specialists. Two of the most well-known are Apfelwein Wagner and Zum Gemalten Haus. These large taverns are often packed and noisy, but lively and fun. If you’d prefer something a little smaller and less hectic, check out Zum Eichkatzerl, Apfelwein DAX or Zum Feuerrädchen. Whichever one you pick, though, expect a traditional atmosphere and lots of wood!

When you’re deciding where to go, note that not all places will take a reservation if you’re just a small group. As the traditional seating style is long, shared tables with benches, they may say they’ll just fit you in somewhere. To be fair, it’s always worked for me so far – and sharing your table with strangers is often a sociable, entertaining affair.

So finally the moment comes: you’re sat at a table ready for a nice glass of ebbelwoi – but how do you order it? Bearing in mind that it can be rather tart? There are three popular choices: straight (pur), mixed with sparkling water (sauer gespritzt) or mixed with lemonade (süß gespritzt). Some purist establishments refuse to serve the sweetened variety, though – and you may be judged if you try to order it!

Most servings are in a 0.3-litre, diamond-patterned glass called a Geripptes. If a few of you are drinking, you could order a Bembel. This is a grey ceramic jug adorned with distinctive blue detailing, which holds a larger amount. You order a Bembel based on how many 0.3-litre glasses of pure apple wine it contains. So a vierer Bembel would contain four 0.3-litre servings, an achter Bembel eight servings. You can then order sparkling water or lemonade to go with it.

A final heads up: if the waiting staff are not that friendly, don’t take it personally – it’s pretty common, it’s not just you. So long as the ebbelwoi and conversation are flowing, good times are sure to be had by all!

The Rhine

The Rhine is a major transport artery, 766 miles long, and its waters sustain lots of boats and wildlife. Grand cities, including Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and even Strasbourg, on the eastern tip of France, hang close to the river. There are also beautiful little riverside settlements along the way, which typify what people mean when they talk about the beauty of rural Germany.

This sense of the rural is accentuated by the numerous vineyards peppered along the Rhine valley. On most cruises, you can stop along the way and visit a vineyard or two, tasting their wines and trying the local food — which is about as authentic a German experience as you can get.

The best bit of the Rhine is undoubtedly the UNESCO-registered section between Koblenz and Rüdesheim, where the steep valley walls are topped with forest and dotted with crag-topping castles and half-timbered towns, each of which has its own river landing.

The Main

The Main isn’t as big as the Rhine, but at 327 miles it is still huge when compared to many other European rivers. Where the Rhine flows from south to north, the Main flows from east to west, through the heart of Germany. And it intersects with the Rhine near Frankfurt, just upstream of the latter’s UNESCO-registered section mentioned above.

Idyllic castles and countryside provide the gorgeous backdrop to a Main river cruise. Most routes pass through Frankfurt, allowing you the opportunity to spend some time in this vibrant city, but also to see it from afar. Its beautiful skyline has earned it the nickname ‘Mainhattan’, as it has some of the most impressively tall and elegant buildings in Europe.

There are also vineyards along the Main, so a comprehensive German wine tour of the Rhine and the Main might be on the cards for the die-hard wine enthusiasts.

The state visit of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh to Germany from 23-26^th June has gone little noticed by most of the media, eclipsed by the likes of royal babies and G7s.  But it will be a significant one, and the first official visit since 2004.

Despite very strong family connections, the royal party will be ignoring the roots of the Hanoverians and the Saxecoburgs. Instead they will be concentrating on more contemporary locations, particularly Berlin, Frankfurt and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle.

The first day, in Berlin, features a welcome at the Bellevue Palace by Joachim Gauck, Germany’s President, after which they will travel down the river Spree by boat to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel at her office. The two women will then lay a wreath at Germany’s Central Memorial for all the victims of war, before attending a state banquet back the Bellevue in the evening.

From Berlin, the royal couple will travel across to Frankfurt next day to visit St Paul’s church, greet the public in the Romer, Frankfurt’s reconstructed central square, and have lunch with the President of Hesse. That evening, back in Berlin, there will be a Garden Party hosted by the British Ambassador.

On their final day, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will start in Pariser Platz by the Brandenburg Gate with Berlin’s Mayor, then fly to Celle (near Hanover) to visit Bergen-Belsen. The latter was a Nazi concentration camp between 1941 and 1945 and the site is maintained as a memorial to the 70,000 people who died there.

The royal couple will lay a wreath at the memorial’s inscription wall after which they will return to Celle Military Airport, and back to the United Kingdom.

It’s a pretty heavy itinerary for anyone to complete, let alone a couple in their late 80s and early 90s.

It’s been another good year for German tourism. Figures to June show a rise in British visitors of 7.5 percent over 2012, and while a good proportion of that is undoubtedly due to the upturn in business travel and the European economy, 55 percent is still leisure travel, particularly city breaks (Berlin accounts for a whopping 22 percent of all overnight stays). Looking back further, the number of British overnights in Germany has increased by a massive 30 percent in the decade since 2003, whilst the likes of France and Spain have been largely static over the same period.

The numbers break down as follows: The most popular city is Berlin, with more than twice as many overnights (1,002,175) as the secondmost popular, Munich. After Munich comes Frankfurt and then Hamburg. Berlin also counts as the most popular federal state, with Bavaria hard on its heels, followed by North Rhine-Westphalia (Dusseldorf, Cologne and the Ruhr) and then by Hesse (Frankfurt and part of the Rhine valley). Germany also tops the worldwide league table when it comes to culture-related trips (ie classical concerts, opera festivals etc).

So why are British visitors picking up on Germany? The German tourist board ascribe some of the increase to the positive publicity emerging from the 2006 World Cup, staged in Germany. Positive leadership during the economic crisis has clearly helped, and Germany surprised everyone by emerging top in a ‘most popular country’ survey done by the BBC this year. Good air links have played their part, as have hotel prices which are considerably better value than elsewhere in Europe. For example the most expensive city in Germany, Munich, has an average price of €123, compared to the average in Paris of €256. And finally a small part of it has to be down to increased awareness of the range and diversity of what Germany has on offer, and a tiny part of the credit for that is due to websites like this one.

Next year’s themes the tourist board will be promoting are: 25 years since the Fall of the Wall (yes, it really is 25 years!), all the German UNESCO World Heritage sites, a big barrier-free travel initiative, and a celebration of 300 years since the first of the House of Hanover acceded to the British throne (being marked with the launch of the new Royal Heritage Route and website http://www.germany.travel/en/ms/royal-heritage/start/royal-heritage.html)

Onwards and upwards!

During the research for my new travel book Tales from the Fast Trains: Europe at 186mph, I made three trips to German cities, travelling from London St Pancras. The first was to Frankfurt, with an ICE train from Brussels for the last leg of the 5hr 56m journey. It arrived seven minutes late, and as we pulled into the Hauptbahnhof, a steward very politely announced in English: “We are very sorry. Zere was a problem with ze high-speed line in ze run up to Liège.”

My girlfriend and I were taken aback – delays of much more than seven minutes go without apology back in Britain (as any British traveller knows only too well).

But, for me, catching trains in Germany has always been a punctual affair; I remember travelling by train between Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Cologne to report for The Times on the England football team’s venues before the 2006 World Cup and being flabbergasted by the way we moved away precisely on time.

On this occasion our weekend in Frankfurt – seeing Goethe’s old house, drinking Ebbelwoi (apple wine), climbing the Frankfurter Dom – was also memorable for a tour we took of the red light district around the Hauptbahnhof. We met our guide at the station, learning from her of the importance of trains when Bismarck was unifying Germany in the 1870s, and then going on a tour highlighting the problems of prostitution and drug use in the streets nearby. Junkies literally injected right in front of us. It was a sad and shocking experience.

There weren’t junkies by the station in Cologne, where I arrived bang on time with an old university friend: 4h 9m from St Pancras. Cologne seemed like a perfect high-speed weekend destination, right next to the station, with so many fine art galleries, history museums and Brauhäuser serving cold Kölsch (Cologne beer) close by. There are plans for direct services on ICE trains from 2013, and I’ve got little doubt that 186mph tourism from the UK will really take off soon.

My third journey was actually by slow train for a short day-return hop to Trier after travelling down high-speed tracks to Luxembourg. What a lovely little city… and so unusual to see so many Chinese tourists heading for the house where Karl Marx was born in 1818. Like all the other trains, the Trier service arrived and left just as scheduled.

If only, if only, if only… it were the same in Britain.

Tales from the Fast Trains by Tom Chesshyre is published by Summersdale, price £8.99

Yes, you did read that right, for the unappetising-sounding Nonnenfürzle literally means ‘small fart of a nun’. Tempted? In fact you should be, because this is actually a very nice choux pastry traditionally eaten around Carnival in a number of German regions, and only in Swabia known as Nonnenfürzle. The dish was actually called Nonnenfürtchen from the old German word nunnekenfurt which simply means ‘best made by nuns’. Some joker thought Nonnenfürtchen could easily be turned into Nonnenfürzchen by substituting one letter (Fürzchen = small fart). Anyway, the dish has nothing to do with bodily functions and tastes very lecker.

Another very old recipe for a dessert is Rostige Ritter or Arme Ritter which translates as ‘rusty knights’ or ‘poor knights’ respectively.  The main ingredients are old bread rolls softened in milk, and similar recipes can be found all over the world, including the UK’s ‘poor knights of Windsor’.

Moving on to some more hearty stuff, a peasant dish that had its moment in the limelight a few years ago is Saumagen, which literally means ‘sow’s stomach’. Let’s just say it’s the German version of haggis and, if well made, is absolutely delicious. It is local to the Palatinate (Pfalz) region and was made famous by former chancellor Helmut Kohl, himself a Pfälzer, who had the dish served, (albeit it in a very refined way), to all of his state visitors from Gorbachev to the Queen. And we’re not aware of any complaints so here we go.

Moving a bit further north, Cologne is another good place for local grub, including the bizarrely named Halver Hahn, which translates as ‘half a cockerel’ but is actually a bread roll with butter and Gouda cheese. There are all sorts of myths about the derivation, but they’re too long-winded to be worth repeating here. Equally odd is another Cologne favourite, Himmel und Erde (heaven and earth) or Himmel und Ääd in proper Cologne vernacular, consisting of potatoes and apples mixed together and eaten with black pudding, onions and bacon. Not heavenly at all if you are a dieting vegetarian.

While Himmel und Ääd can be understood even if you’re not from Cologne, there are some regions where you’re going to need to know the local vocabulary to unlock the menu. In the Saarland, for example, the delightful-sounding Dibbelabbes is dialect for the word Topflappen, which means oven cloth, and the dish it describes is a kind of hearty pancake.

In Frankfurt and the whole Rhine Hesse area they eat Handkäs mit Musik, ‘hand cheese with music’, another one that requires some explanation. The dish is a very specific local sour milk cheese that is marinated with onions. The music bit, allegedly, refers to the sounds that might be produced after digesting the onions; blame any nuns sitting nearby!

As in the UK, there’s been a recent trend in Germany to rediscover old dishes and recipes with young restaurateurs giving them a 21^st century spin. In Berlin, the starting place for all things cool, the focus has been on regional products and reinterpreting German cuisine. At the Heinrich restaurant in Mitte, for example, the owners have researched old recipes from the 1920s and 1930s to put together a menu with dishes “we love from our parents and grandparents”. The bestseller is ‘Proud Heinrich’, fried sausage with mashed potatoes and a dark beer sauce. Yum, I’d have that. And a Nonnenfürzle for pudding.

More food -related Wunderbar links: German Wine Route (for sampling the Saumagen),  culinary city tours in Speyer, Black Forest gourmet heaven, cabbage culture in the north, seafood and salty humour, coffee & cake

Let’s face it, Frankfurt is not really a buzzing, touristy city. Most visitors are struck by the gleaming towers, scurrying office workers, and the rather down-at-heel area around the main railway station. The museum embankment – Museumsufer – alongside the river is active, well organised and innovative, and there are a couple of good riverside places for an evening drink. But if you didn’t know about Sachsenhausen, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the city emptied of people after office hours.

Recreation in Frankfurt is not just about the joggers on the banks of the Main and the art on the walls of the museums. If you keep on walking from the east end of the Museumsufer and deviate a little inland, you’ll eventually reach Sachsenhausen, a refuge from commerce where the atmosphere is always one of quiet celebration.

Whether you’ll have a good experience with Ebbelwoi may depend on the time of year

Sachsenhausen is to this city what the East End is to London; traditionally, the Frankfurter cockneys live here, but instead of eating jellied eels, pie and mash, they sit down at long open-air tables to tuck into Handkäs with Musik (hard cheese with chopped onions, aka Musik because of the flatulence they produce), or even Grüne Soße (curd cheese with finely chopped onions and green sauce made up of seven different types of herb) eaten with eggs and potatoes, all of it washed down with Ebbelwoi (apple wine).

Bars and restaurants are jammed cheek-by-jowl into Old Sachsenhausen’s narrow, pedestrian-only streets, particularly around Grosse Rittergasse, Kleine Rittergasse and Paradiesgasse. Most of these establishments are less authentic than those in neighbouring Affentorplatz, where those that sell Ebbelwoi, such as Struwwelpeter, have a garland of fir branches hanging outside.

In these places the locals are marked by their ruminative stare and the lids on their glasses, supposedly to keep the Micke – Frankfurt dialect for flies – out of the brew. Whether you’ll have a good experience with Ebbelwoi may depend on the time of year; in late summer it starts sweet, getting progressively more alcoholic and bitter as the months progress. By Christmas it can knock you off your chair, Micke and all.

Most of the genuine Ebbelwoi places are family run, along the same lines as beer gardens, and some have live entertainment in the evenings. Outside the lively pedestrian areas, popular venues are Apfelwein Wagner on Schweizerstrasse and Zur Germania on Textorstrasse.

The city also runs a tram service called the Ebbelwoi Express, on a regular hop-on hop-off itinerary through the city centre and out to Sachsenhausen, with pretzels and applewine included in the price.