Wine Tour Day 7 - Les Routes des Vins D’Alsace

Leaving Obernai this morning was considerably easier than arriving at it two days ago (see entry for 22/8) and, with all day to make our way to our next destination of Colmar, we elected to drive the very snaky Wine Route Road through around 20-25 quiet little villages dotted across the miles of vineyards that seems to make up most of Alsace.

The scenery we drove through today was beautiful - the sun was beating down at around 25 degrees even by the time we set off so I was very grateful for an air conditioned car. All along the route you will see brightly spray-painted bicycles mounted on fence posts and sides of buildings. As well as being wine country (I think all of France is technically wine country) this is cycling country! There were even still signs up from this year’s Tour de France which passes through this area. We passed many intrepid cyclists as we progressed sedately along.

First proper stop was a town called Bergheim. Bergheim, as well as being very pretty (standard), is notable for having had its entire population wiped out by a combination of war and plague in the 17th and 18th Centuries. To rectify this immigrants from other European countries were invited to settle there and the population is therefore only around 10-15 generations old, made up of Swiss, Germans, Romanians etc. Lunch here was a simple platter of meat, cheese, salad and bread. Salad!! Mmmm... After a week of sauerkraut being more or less the only vegetable matter to pass our lips, you can imagine how good that salad was!

The next town along from Bergheim is Ribeauvillé which is reckoned to be one of the prettiest in the region. I think it probably was but it was also, by contrast to the peaceful Bergheim, teeming with other tourists so we did not stay long. The main photo on this entry is of Ribeauvillé, passing through the old town walls.

We did stay long enough, however, to sample some more wines. Mandy has developed a taste for Riesling (expensive ones) and I have fallen in love with Cremant Rose (cheap-ish ones). As I was driving we only had very small tasters but it was enough to have us (me) lumping another box of winey purchases back to our car.

And finally on to Colmar. Our guest house is a grand old place that has a very cool cat as a permanent resident, with whom I have tried to make friends - so far with limited success.

Tomorrow we will explore Colmar’s Old Town with “Little Venice” apparently well worth a look.