The Wurstmarkt

For 9 days each year spanning the 2nd and 3rd weekends of September, Bad Dürkheim hosts the largest wine festival in the world. It runs 24 hours a day Thursday-Monday the first weekend and Friday-Monday the second weekend. We were in Sardinia for the first weekend of it this year but returned in time to enjoy a few nights of the second weekend.

There are food booths, game booths, carnival rides, a few shops and, most importantly, wine booths! Each of the vintners from Bad Dürkheim had a booth - maybe 25 booths total. Some of them had a pavilion filled with benches like in the picture below and some of them had outdoor sitting at tables like at a restaurant.

At all of these booths you get yourself a Weinschörle, which is supposed to be 0.25 liters of wine and 0.25 liters of sparkling water but they were definitely making them more like 70-30 in favor of wine when I was there.

Here I am holding our Schörles:

The first night we went we hung out with our realtor and her group of friends. They're all locals so they have a table reserved at one of the restaurant-like wine booths. Here are some of our schörles on the table:

We learned that there is one day of the festival where only the locals are allowed to go for what they call early morning drinking. They all show up at 7am and sit together and drink until 10am while the festival is closed to everybody else. On a Monday no less!! I love this town.

The second night we went was the last night of the Wurstmarkt, Monday night. There were fireworks at 9pm and it was the most crowded night of the festival. We rode the ferris wheel and took some pictures of the crowds below:

There is also this really high up spinning ride that I wanted to go on but Martin said no. :(

We did manage to enjoy a lot of fair (read: junk) food at the festival. Mostly traditional German fair food. Nutella crepes, Flammkuchen (a very thin crust topped with some creamy cheese, onions, and pancetta), bratwurst, döner kebabs, deep friend potato patties (traditionally served with apple sauce but as an American I take mine with ketchup), and German kisses which are rather large marshmallows with a wafer base covered with chocolate and other assorted toppings. So. Good. (and so full of sugar!) We brought some home and I put them on Martin's laptop keyboard so you could tell how big they are: