Württemberg follows the Neckar and its tributaries through the hills around Stuttgart and Heilbronn, about 11,500 hectares that make it the fourth largest German region. It is the one place in Germany where red grapes outnumber white, by a wide margin, and the one whose wine is largely drunk where it is made.

Trollinger, light and pale, is the everyday red of Swabia and rarely leaves it. Lemberger, the same grape as Austria's Blaufränkisch, is the serious one, giving structured wines with firm acidity, and Schwarzriesling and Spätburgunder fill out the rest. Riesling is the main white and does well on the shell limestone slopes along the river. Cooperatives dominate the region more than anywhere else in Germany, which has held back its reputation, though a growing number of individual estates now work the steep terraced sites that the cooperatives find uneconomic.