Beware, Bordeaux.(Award-winning wine from Malterdingen, Germany.)

Bernhard Huber's epiphany was buried in a bundle of dusty old papers. Digging through historical documents in the archive of his home village of Malterdingen, the German wine-making apprentice found a fragile parchment covered in ancient script. Written in the 13th century by Cistercian monks, it praised Malterdingen's elegant and much sought- after wines. What a far cry from recent years, when the town's wine- making cooperative produced swill that in good years was drunk by the locals--and in bad years was hardly drunk at all. "If they made good wine back then, it's got to be possible to make good wine now," Huber says he thought.

He was right. After discovering those papers back in 1984, Huber took his family's vineyards out of the cooperative and set about overhauling their product. Now, 18 years later--and for the first time in generations--Malterdingen wine is again winning plaudits. At professional wine tastings in Paris, London and Copenhagen, Huber's Sptburgunder--a silky, luxurious red made from the pinot noir grape-- has consistently scored top notches, beating much more famous (and pricier) French and Californian wines. "Huber's wine is absolutely one of the top in the world," raves Francois Mauss, a Frenchman and the president of the Grand Jury Europeen, a renowned Luxembourg-based tasting panel. "If you'd asked me 20 years ago if the Germans could one day make a wine like this, I would have said never, never, never."

For generations, German wine production was dominated by jug-wine cooperatives and plonk factories. Their "sweet and cheap" specials made for the bottom shelf of the supermarket--Blue Nun, Red Tower, Liebfraumilch--made German wines a joke among oenophiles. But in recent years, thanks to the efforts of ambitious young wine makers like Huber, German wines are on the rise. Now, there's hardly a competition where a bottle of Sptburgunder or Riesling, the country's traditional white- wine grape, doesn't win an accolade; at the closely watched International Wine Challenge competition in London last month, German wines won more trophies than any other country, including France. "We were sick of getting snickered at," says Prince Michael of Salm-Salm, who owns an ancient castle winery and ...