Long before Riesling made Germany's name in wine, legend says an Irish monk pushed his walking staff into a hillside above the Nahe River and watched wine begin to flow from it. Nearly 1,400 years later, that hillside is still producing grapes, and German wine lore still gives the credit to a saint from Ireland.
Saint Disibod was born around the year 619 into a minor chieftain's family in Ireland. He was ordained a priest at 30 and later elected bishop, but his strict reforms made him enemies among local clergy. Around 653, he was forced from his post and left Ireland altogether, sailing for the continent with a small band of companions in search of a place more open to his monastic ideals.
He found it at the meeting point of the Nahe and Glan rivers in what is now Rhineland-Palatinate, according to the Germany Glossary of Wine (Wein,plus). Plus, legend held that Disibod had been shown the spot in a dream, described only as "where two rivers meet," and he recognized the confluence when he arrived.
Findthesaint.com adds a more colorful detail, noting that local legend credits a deer with digging up a fresh spring at the site, sealing its selection as a place of prayer and settlement.
It is the next part of the story that gives Germany's wine industry its Irish origin myth. Wein.plus's profile of the modern Weingut Disibodenberg winery states that when the exhausted monk drove his walking stick into the ground on the mountainside, legend has it that the wood took root and sprouted into a vine on the spot. German tradition has run with that image ever since, crediting the wandering Irish missionary with planting the seed, quite literally, of the region's wine culture.
Saint Disibod.
Whatever its mythical origins, the vineyard on Disibodenberg has a documented history stretching back centuries. Wines of Germany, the trade group representing the German wine industry, reports that traces of vines on the hill's southern slope show the cloister vineyards have been farmed continuously since at least the 11th century, and the wine estate has been owned by the von Racknitz family since 1753. In 2008, the same source reports that workers discovered five surviving grapevines of the White Orleans variety, long thought extinct in Germany, tangled feral into an old wall. Research suggested they were probably the oldest grapevines in the country, likely dating to sometime between 1108 and 1559, when the monastery on the hill was active.
That monastery grew up after Disibod's death, eventually becoming a Benedictine house in 1108. Its most famous resident was not Disibod himself but Hildegard von Bingen, who entered as a young nun in 1112 and stayed for four decades before becoming one of medieval Europe's most celebrated mystics, composers, and healers. Wines of Germany notes that Hildegard wrote extensively about wine in her herbal medicine texts, praising pure wine for its power to cleanse and strengthen the blood of anyone who drank it. It was Hildegard, writing around 1170, who first set down Disibod's life story in her Vita Sancti Dysibodi, the main source for what little is known about him today.
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Findthesaint.com records that Disibod died on July 8 in the year 700, though several traditions place his death on September 8 instead, which has become his feast day. St. Boniface, the missionary bishop known as the Apostle of the Germans, presided over the transfer of Disibod's relics to the monastery's main church in 754.
The monastery was shuttered after the Reformation and slid into ruin, but the site has never stopped drawing visitors. Wines of Germany describes the ruins today as a romantic landmark on the Nahe, complete with a small museum near the entrance and picnics organized by the current Wine Estate von Racknitz, Riesling included. The Wein.plus glossary notes that the last private owner eventually passed the grounds to the Disibodenberg SCIVIAS Foundation in 1989, ensuring the hill where an Irish monk supposedly planted a vine with his staff remains in public hands for good.
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