Spitz

The thousand-bucket hill

Spitz an der Donau sits at roughly the halfway point of the north-bank route, and its defining landmark is the Tausendeimerberg — literally "the thousand-bucket hill" — a steeply terraced vineyard directly above the village. The name is a straightforward boast from growers of an earlier era: in a strong year, the hill alone yielded a thousand buckets of wine, a scale meant to say something about the quality of this particular slope, not just its size.

A working wine village, not a set piece

Spitz has the Heurigen (seasonal wine taverns) and the narrow lanes you'd expect from a Wachau wine village, but it's a genuinely active winemaking centre rather than a preserved-for-tourism version of one. It's a natural place to pause partway through the ride, whether that means a coffee, a plate of something local, or a first taste of the Steinfeder/Federspiel/Smaragd tiers explained elsewhere on this site.