Bridge on the river Mosel?

from I'm Tasting Tar, Traffic Cones, Motor Oil …A planned bridge could ruin Germany's cherished Mosel wine region by Mike Steinberger:

Crews are already laying down the roadway, which will be part of a highway known as the B50, and they are now just 3 kilometers from Ürziger Würzgarten. After crossing the river, the B50 will run above a clutch of other fabled sites, including the vineyards of Zeltingen, Graach, Wehlen, and Bernkastel. Deep trenches will be built to accommodate the 40-meter-wide highway, and winemakers fear that this could adversely affect water distribution in the vineyards.
[snip]
But some prominent local winemakers—Manfred Prüm, Willi Schaefer, Markus Molitor, and Erni Loosen—have all come out against the bridge and will be attending Friday's rally. Washington hopes that their participation, along with Hugh Johnson's, might generate enough international headlines to shame the German authorities into shelving the project.

If the motorway's foundations are already under way, it seems a rather forlorn hope to stop this project.

I feel rather ambivalent about it. In recent years, I have quite often driven from Belgium to Hahn airport to pick up and deliver my son and his family off/to ultra-cheap flights. The last 50km are a nightmare along windy roads which are quite dangerous in wet and icy weather. Beyond that, a glance at the map shows that better communications from Benelux to Frankfurt and beyond are desirable to take pressure off the crowded Rhine valley routes. My quarrel is with the precise route. Surely a less sensitive spot for the river crossing could have been found.

There have been other motorway projects in famous French vineyard areas, e.g. a ring road west of Lyon tunnelling under the Côte Rôtie vineyards and crossing the Rhône under their nose and the outer Bordeaux ring road passing through the middle of the Margaux vineyards. I am not sure what has happened to these but there were petitions and a lot of protest. New roads are now becoming Politically Incorrect but perhaps not as much as wine.

[David M. Bueker]

I've seen any number of versions of this tale, including some pretty fanciful artwork. I'm no fan of this project, but I will point out a silver lining:

In this current age of global warming and rampant sugar ripeness, a touch of shade (it's not like this bridge will permanently blot out the sun along the Mosel) just might get us back to more typical wines instead of the tropical fruit bombs we've seen for the last 5 or 6 years.

In any event, I lament the loss of any fine vineyard land, and if let's say the Urziger Wurzgarten is reduced to a site suited for tafelwein then we've have a much more serious problem, but it's not like this hasn't happened before. Some Rheingau sites disappeared in the '70s due to road work, and we survived.