Wine at Oktoberfest

The one tent at Oktoberfest that stops serving beer.

Somewhere on the Theresienwiese, among fourteen enormous halls dedicated to the serious business of drinking beer by the liter, there is a tent that stops serving it at nine in the evening.

After that, it's wine only.

This sounds like a mistake, or at best a concession to the one friend in every group who doesn't drink beer. It isn't. Wine has been poured at Oktoberfest for a hundred and forty years, and the wine in question comes from a region that most people outside Germany have no idea exists — a region that happens to be part of Bavaria itself.

The wine tent isn't an intrusion into a Bavarian festival. It's the other half of Bavaria.

A hundred and forty years of wine on the Wiesn

Wine arrived at Oktoberfest in 1885, when a Spanish bodega set up on the festival grounds and began pouring. That's worth sitting with for a moment: a Spanish wine merchant at a Munich beer festival, nearly a century and a half ago, and the tradition never stopped.

It has outlasted a great deal of what visitors now think of as core Oktoberfest tradition. Plenty of the festival's familiar furniture — the tent layouts, the beer that's actually poured, the food stands — has changed more in that time than the presence of wine has.

Today it survives as one large tent given over to wine, sparkling wine and Champagne, decorated in the style of a Franconian wine garden rather than a beer hall. Wheat beer is served there until nine, which is the compromise that keeps everyone in the room. After nine, the compromise ends.

Bavaria makes wine

Here is the fact that reframes the whole thing: Bavaria has a wine region, and it's a good one.

Franconia — Franken in German — sits in the north of the state, strung along the Main river around the city of Würzburg. It is politically Bavarian and culturally its own thing entirely, with its own dialect, its own food, and a wine tradition that goes back centuries. Ask most people to name a German wine region and you'll hear the Mosel or the Rheingau. Franken rarely comes up, and it's the only one that's Bavarian.

It's a small region with a harsher, more continental climate than Germany's river valleys further west — colder winters, a shorter growing season — which pushes it toward grapes that ripen early and reliably rather than toward Riesling.

And here's where the American mental image of German wine falls apart. Franken wines are typically trocken — bone dry. Not off-dry, not gently sweet, but dry in a firm, savoury, unsentimental way. If your idea of German wine was formed by a sweet Riesling somewhere in the 1990s, this is close to the opposite of that.

Silvaner, and a bottle you'd recognise

Franconia's signature grape is Silvaner, and Franconia is the place that made Silvaner worth taking seriously.

It is not a showy wine. There's very little of the perfume or tropical fruit that sells other white grapes — instead you get texture, a dry stony quality, something faintly herbal or savoury underneath, and a clean finish. It's a wine built around structure rather than flavour fireworks, which sounds like faint praise until you put it next to food, at which point it becomes the entire point. Müller-Thurgau is also planted widely across the region and turns up in the same glasses.

The other thing to know is the bottle. Franken wine is traditionally sold in a Bocksbeutel — a squat, flattened, rounded flask that looks like nothing else on a shelf. The shape is legally protected and effectively acts as a regional signature. A great many American wine drinkers have seen one in a store, registered it as odd, and walked past. Now you know what it was.

What else is in the glass

The tent pours more than still wine.

Sekt is German sparkling wine, and it deserves an honest introduction. The bulk of it is made industrially, in large tanks, and is pleasant rather than interesting — the German equivalent of everyday supermarket fizz. But grower-made Winzersekt, produced by individual estates from their own fruit and often aged properly on the lees, is a genuinely serious category and almost unknown outside Germany. If you only know Sekt from the cheap end, that's a bit like judging Champagne by airport miniatures.

Champagne is served too, which tells you something about the room's character. This is not a rustic corner of the festival; it's the tent where people order bottles.

And the wheat beer stays on until nine, for anyone easing into the idea. For where Weissbier sits among the festival's other beers, see Oktoberfest beer explained.

What to drink with festival food

This is the part that's genuinely useful, and it goes well beyond the tent.

Dry Silvaner against roast chicken is one of the better pairings in European eating, and it's a direct answer to what Oktoberfest actually serves. The festival runs on Hendl — half a chicken, buttered, salted, roasted until the skin crackles — and a wine with firm acidity and a savoury edge cuts through crisp skin and rendered fat in a way that a soft, malty lager doesn't attempt to. The beer works with the food by matching its richness. The wine works by pushing against it. Both are legitimate, and they're doing different jobs.

The same logic extends across the menu. Salty cheese spread on a pretzel, cured and roasted pork, vinegary cabbage salads, cold sausage in oil and onion — this is food built on fat, salt and acid, and a dry, structured white handles all three without effort. If anything, the harder pairing challenge at Oktoberfest is finding something that doesn't work with Silvaner.

None of this is an argument against the beer. A liter of Festbier with a roast chicken is a fine thing and the six Munich breweries have had a couple of centuries to get it right. It's simply worth knowing there's a second door into the same meal.

Finding Franken wine in the United States

Now the honest part: you will probably struggle.

Franconia is a small region that drinks most of what it makes, and its exports are modest. Silvaner in a Bocksbeutel turns up in serious independent wine shops and in some German specialists, but it is not a supermarket proposition in most of the country. It's worth asking for by name — the Bocksbeutel is easy to describe and a good shop will know instantly what you mean — but don't build a dinner around finding one on a Friday afternoon.

What to pour instead, all of it widely available:

Dry German Riesling. Look for trocken on the label, which is the same word doing the same job. It's more aromatic and more overtly fruity than Silvaner, but it brings the same firm acidity and the same food-friendliness, and it's the easiest substitute to find.

Grüner Veltliner. Austrian, dry, with a peppery savoury streak and enough weight to stand up to roast meat. Arguably the closest match in spirit — it does the same unshowy structural work, and it's excellent with anything crisp-skinned.

Alsatian Sylvaner. The same grape, different border. French Alsace grows Sylvaner in a slightly rounder, softer style, and bottles are easier to find in the US than their German counterparts.

Any of the three will do what the wine tent does: cut the fat, refresh the palate, and let you get to the end of a very rich meal still wanting more of it.

Worth knowing, worth trying

The wine tent is a small oddity at an enormous festival, and most visitors will never set foot in it. But it points at something larger — that Bavaria's identity is broader than the beer hall, that Germany's wines are drier and more varied than their reputation, and that a Spanish merchant in 1885 spotted an opportunity that has quietly outlasted almost everything around it.

For the rest of what's poured and eaten on the Theresienwiese, start with our guide to Oktoberfest food and drink.