31/5/11 - Alsace Wine Route, France

The Rue de Vin d’Alsace is a road that runs through all the wine villages south of Strasbourg, and is parallel to the German border.  As with Germany, the specialties are Riesling and Gewurztraminer.

We used two guidebooks to plan this bit – one of them does the whole wine route and back to Germany in one day, and the other takes a week. I nice illustration I think, that the distance to cover is quite small, but there is a lot to see. I counted at least 16 towns or villages along the way.

The start of our trip was in the village of Obernai, and we finished the day in Ribeauville. We drove through a few of the little towns, and they are all quite beautiful – however, I got a little fed up with trying to thread through the tiny village centers and we did dodge out to the motorway to skip down part of it.

Town centre of Barr, our first stop on the wine route.

This is a cool little tractor thing that gathers the vines up and runs string between the posts.

The sat nav was also having a nightmare of a time. Which reminds me:

Dear sat nav,

The following are NOT roads:

·      Footpaths

·      People’s driveways

·      Rivers

·      Unsealed tracks that go around the edge of empty fields

Thanks, Morgan

We also checked out the castle of Chateau de Haut-Konigsbourg, which is about half way along. It was acquired by Kaiser Wilhelm the II and renovated in 1900 to become a museum and a symbol of Germany’s ownership of the Alsace (didn’t work, clearly). It is 800m above the plain, and the view is amazing. You can clearly see the rocky outcrop it is built on, and it is really interesting to see the wooden buildings on top of the walls that arevnormally missing on old castles. The renovations continue today. An amazing spot, and probably our favorite castle so far.

I'm pondering getting one of these for the van.

Looking down on to the top of enormous oak trees, this gave me the heebies just a little bit.

We finished our trip by staying in Ribeuville, which was pretty but very touristy. We stayed one night, bought the most expensive bottle of wine we have ever purchased, ate an Alsatian specialty which was baked cheese and potato – and moved on the next day.

Ribeauville - very pretty

Mum and dad – we have a great book called ‘Back Roads France’ which you can have a look at when we see you. It might be worth you buying a copy – it is by Eyewitness Travel published by DK.