The Black Cat of Zell

The scene is a wine cellar in Zell, in the house Am Römerbad 2. There the vintner Peter Anton Mayntzer kept his casks; in the town he counts as the father of the Schwarze Katz. Tradition has it that in 1863 wine merchants from Aachen came to him to buy.

The tasting dragged on. Three casks came into question, and the merchants could not settle it: one seemed exactly as good as the next. They had the tasting siphon put in once more, and once more, and got not a step further.

Then the black house cat joined in. Mori was her name, and she had slipped into the cellar unnoticed. She jumped onto one of the three casks, arched her back high, hissed and struck out with her claws at anyone who came too near. Into that cask the siphon went no second time.

The merchants looked at one another and decided there and then: we shall take the cask the animal defends so fiercely. The wine from that cask sold so well that the men from Aachen later bought up the whole yield of the vineyard site it came from. And the site was given the name of the cat.

As neatly as the story runs, very little of it is fixed. This is no medieval legend. Tradition places the scene in 1863, and even that date is passed on with the careful formula that this is how it is told. A document from that year confirming the episode does not appear in the usual accounts. What there is, is a story that went from mouth to mouth in Zell and was written down only much later.

Add to that the fact that the story does exactly what a good advertising story does. It explains a name, gives it a face and ends with merchants buying up a whole vintage. Anyone who has to sell a name rarely invents something duller. That the legend also grew out of the trade is therefore the sober reading.

Official standing came much later. German wine law divides origin into four steps: Anbaugebiet, Bereich, Grosslage and Einzellage. In that order, which took its present shape with the law of 1971, Schwarze Katz is a Grosslage within the Bereich Burg Cochem. It gathers sixteen individual sites in Zell, Merl and Kaimt. Of the wine from this site by far the greatest part now leaves the country.

The cat has meanwhile acquired her monuments. In 1936 a fountain was set up for her in the old town, and that same fountain adorns the first note of the Zell regional currency. Since August 2012 she has been sitting again, far larger, on the roundabout at the entrance to the town: a design by the caricaturist Michael Apitz from the Rheingau, executed by the artist Friedrich Freiburg from the Sauerland.

The reason there is wine in Zell at all stands just behind the town. The Moselle cuts through slate here, and the slopes are so steep that the region counts as the largest area of steep-slope viticulture in the world. About forty per cent of the vineyards lie on gradients of thirty to well over sixty per cent.

This is no landscape for machines. Much is done by hand, and on the hardest parcels small monorack railways carry people and tools uphill. Zell has a good three hundred and thirty hectares under vine and is thus, after Piesport, the largest wine-growing municipality on the Moselle. Riesling predominates.

The craft is old here. Zell is a Roman foundation of after the year 70, and in the district of Kaimt a stone foundation charter of about 1220 is preserved which carries the oldest known depiction of a vintner. In 1222 the place received the right to surround itself with a wall.

Of that wall the Runder Turm still stands, the emblem of the town: a round tower of three storeys with a curved cap, put up after the destruction of 1689. Its narrow arrow slits earned it the byname Pulverturm, and at Christmas it is lit as an oversized candle above the roofs.

A little further on stands the castle. Between 1535 and 1542 the Trier elector Johann III von Metzenhausen had a secondary residence built on what is now the Schloßstraße, with round corner towers and late Gothic arched friezes. In 1803, in the secularisation, it passed into private hands; today a hotel is housed in it. From there to the market square is a few minutes — and there the cat sits on her fountain.