I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Last year I was on a mid-German crystalline high and this high was pretty awesome.

Now it may sound like I was doing something illegal,

but no, I was just standing on a geologic formation

known as the mid-German

crystalline high.

In fact, in a way, we can thank this crystalline high

for the mosel wines, because thanks to a collision with this continental plate fragment, we have the unique

slate soils of the Mosel River Valley.

The Mosel and its tributaries wind to and fro throughout the slate outcropping,

but the Mosel wasn't always full of bends,

and the ground wasn't always made of slate. 400 million years ago, the mowsal area was a shallow sea with a thick bed of sedimentary

mud and clay.

The earth was warm and there weren't many glaciers around.

This made the sea level higher and much of today's land was submerged.

But when tectonic plate activity increased, and the land masses collided, they pushed

into each other and created pressure and heat that caused the sea floor sediments to chemically

morph into slate.

Pressure between plates also caused buckling on the Earth's surface and created several mountains

in hilly regions.

The mosele slate rose up up and eventually a long flat wide

...