The Route du Vin is the Wine Road of Alsace. This region, between the Rhine River and the Vosges Mountains, has historically been fought over between France and Germany. The Germans believe the mountains are the natural border, while the French think it’s the river. It’s interesting to think that this is a kind of continental cultural divide — with Romance cultures to the south, and Germanic to the north. Perhaps that explains how every other city here feels like it’s been rebuilt after a terrible war. Using Colmar as a springboard, it’s easy to tour the region.
Alsace’s Wine Road is blanketed with lush vineyards and dotted with charming towns. You can hike, bike, hire a taxi, catch the bus, or join a minibus tour like I did (a half-day for €60).
The Route du Vin is dotted with delicious little towns. Kaysersberg is one of the most charming.
Alsatian villages nestle in valleys on small rivers, which medieval villagers hijacked, broke into canals, and used to power their mills. Today, when you explore these towns, it’s fun to imagine what a blessing water power must have been.
This sign marked the mansion of the Kaysersberg gourmet. I never realized the derivation of the word “gourmet”: Each city in a wine region (like Alsace) had a man appointed to rate and price wines, and serve as the middleman between vintners and the wine-drinking public. He facilitated the sale of wine…and knew that having quality food in association with the wine would help. Eventually he became the man with the finest food in town, or the “gourmet.” The actual job of the gourmet survived in Alsace until the 1930s.
Absolutely beautiful, thank you.
Very fine pics, thanks. Glad to see that Rick is finally back in prime (and picturesque) European tour locales again. Look forward to the tv shows to be filmed in France.
Rick, I’m so sorry we missed you! We spent several days exploring the Route de Vin late last week. Great experience (when you avoid the tour buses!) with beautiful countryside and quaint towns nestled atop hillsides. It’s fun to drive the twisting roads and you can switch over to the parallel highway to make better time if needed.
We had a wonderful tasting at the Rapp vineyard in Dorlisheim. We just stumbled upon it and wandered in. The charming host, working us in around supervising the washtub bath of her young son, explained their wines and led us through a tasting of eight of them, ranging from the dry bubbly to the sweet dessert wines. She let us compare different vintages of the same wine and taste the differences the production technique makes. It was a wonderful experience. It helped that one of us spoke passable French, but I’d recommend it regardless. It was so much better than the rush-them-through experience we got at some of the better known, more popular places. Take a chance and explore!
Incidentally, our home base was an apartment along one of the canals in Strasbourg. We’d recommend that over Colmar, which seemed disappointingly touristy and in places, junky and tacky. Strasbourg also has a cathedral light show similar to the one Rick mentions watching in Chartres, as apparently do many French cities. Our favorite was the understated presentation in Amiens, where the lights show the hundreds of statures on the front of the cathedral in the colors they were originally painted. It’s breathtaking,
How wonderful it would be to live in such a beautiful place! Thank you for the amazing photographs.