Deidesheim's municipal area stretches for 26.53 square kilometres (10.24 sq mi), covering parts of three morphological and ecological units, namely the Palatinate Forest, the Weinstraße region's uplands and the Upper Rhine Plain: 23.9% of this area is used for agriculture, mainly grape-growing for wine, 67.9% of it is wooded, 0.6% is water, 7.4% is residential or transport-related and 0.1% of the land fits under none of these headings.

The outliers of the Madental and the Sensental, as well as those of the Einsteltal (dales) northwest of Deidesheim, form outflow pathways for the cold winds coming from the Haardt.

The most important event in the Deidesheim area's, and indeed the whole eastern Palatinate's, geological development was the rifting and downfaulting relative to the Haardt of the Upper Rhine Plain, whose onset was some 65,000,000 years ago in the Lower Tertiary and which has lasted until today.

These processes led to a transformation of the original surface relief in whose wake an alluvial fan with embanked or eroded terraces formed.

The first time when the placename was mentioned in 699 was in a document in which the Lotharingian nobleman Erimbert bequeathed estates under his ownership to Weißenburg Monastery in Alsace (in the now French town called Wissembourg).

Frankish burial grounds in and around the neighbouring municipality Niederkirchen bei Deidesheim lead to the conclusion that there were individual settlements at least as long ago as the 6th century, some of which were forsaken.

On Saint Valentine's Day 1395, the Bohemian King Wenceslaus (Wenzel in German, Václav in Czech) granted Deidesheim town rights.

Under the new territorial order prescribed by the Congress of Vienna, Deidesheim belonged, beginning in 1816, to the Kingdom of Bavaria as part of the Rheinkreis (“Rhine District”), which from 1838 bore the name Pfalz (“Palatinate”).

In the rather more peaceful later 18th century, Deidesheim underwent a great upswing in its population, bringing the total number of inhabitants to nearly three times what it had been towards the end of the Middle Ages.

The community was wiped out in the pogrom during the time of the plague in 1349 when all Deidesheim's Jews were slain and the synagogue passed into the Church's ownership.

Seven Jews who were born or had long lived in Deidesheim were deported in 1940 under the so-called Bürckel-Wagner Action (they were both Gauleiters), even Mrs. Reinach, who had survived Camp Gurs; all were murdered in The Holocaust.

In the early 19th century in Deidesheim, an influential class of winery estate owners formed who always put forward the honorary mayor, even through to the Weimar Republic’s downfall, and were markedly overrepresented on town council.

The last mayor, Ludwig Bassermann-Jordan, had been killed in the war after volunteering for service, and his deputy, Karl Kimich, was elected in his stead.

Outrage was the response, for on the one hand, the electorate would thereby be bypassed, and on the other, many found the yearly salary of 12,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ quite beyond the pale against the backdrop of the Great Depression, which had just broken out.

The Neustadt regional office eventually decreed on 20 March that the estate owner Friedrich Eckel-Sellmayr should be mayor; he had already held a seat on town council since 1924 as part of the Bürgerliste formed by the Left-Liberals and the commercial association.

After the Americans had occupied Deidesheim towards the end of the war in March 1945, they appointed the retired headteacher Michael Henrich mayor; Ernst Fürst became his deputy.

Beginning in the 1840s, Ludwig Andreas Jordan and Franz Peter Buhl gathered liberal politicians in their houses who were of the “Greater German” mindset.

The church is counted among the most important witnesses to Late Gothic architecture in the Palatinate by the Bad Dürkheim district's catalogue of memorial sites.

From this branch location of the Abbey grew today's inn, whose innkeepers and leaseholders can be traced back in an unbroken line to the year 1374.

Since 1994 the Café Alt Deidesheim has belonged to it as a “meeting place of the generations”, as has the Gästehaus „Ritter von Böhl“ (inn), whose proceeds go to benefit the Spital.

The Geißbockversteigerung (literally “Billygoat Auction”) is a folk festival in the form of a historical game that is celebrated each year on the Tuesday after Whitsun.

The Foundation is financed by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (“German Academy for Language and Poetry”), Südwestrundfunk, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the town of Deidesheim.

Some 170 vineyards and plots of greatly varying size are known to have been within the limits of Deidesheim, Niederkirchen, Forst and Ruppertsberg; they stretched partly across municipal boundaries as they now exist (they were not assigned until 1829).

By implementing his ideas in production and marketing, Andreas managed to earn Qualitätswein prizes, becoming very wealthy and able to expand his winery appreciably.

Just like Deidesheim's secondary economic underpinning, tourism, winegrowing, too, profits to a great extent from the Weinstraße region's natural particularity, namely the extraordinarily favourable climate.

After the Palatinate’s first railway line, between Ludwigshafen and Bexbach, came into service in 1849, Dürkheim, Deidesheim and the other municipalities in the Middle Haardt, too, strove for a rail link.

A local committee put forth a suggestion in 1860 to build a railway line from Neustadt to Dürkheim in Frankenthal, a request that was granted on 3 February 1862 by the administration of the Pfälzische Ludwigsbahn.

The Bavarian King Maximilian II eventually awarded the committee, represented by the eight signatories thereto, the “Supreme Concession Document for Forming a Corporation to Build and Run a Railway from Neustadt a. H. to Dürkheim”.

The hotel Deidesheimer Hof with its “Nobelrestaurant Schwarzer Hahn”, once run by leading-edge cook Manfred Schwarz, is known above all for former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visits, on which he often brought along state guests to entertain.

This Sektkellerei now works 6 ha of its own vineyards around Deidesheim and draws the greater part of the raw wines that it needs to make Sekt from wineries in the nearby area.