Forget about the wine for a moment
This isn’t really about the wine, it’s about great cycling, beautiful scenery and a fantastic bike path. The vineyards of Alsace stretch in a line running north to south from Strasbourg almost to Mulhouse, with the Vosges mountains towering behind them to the west.
You can see an overview of the wine route, and a little bit of blurb from the tourist office, here.
Every few miles is a beautiful village, made up of brightly-painted steep-roofed half-timbered houses. In an earlier age the different colours denoted the different trades of each shop, but the tradition of brightly coloured buildings has outlasted most of the trades, and we get the benefit.
These villages are linked by the old roads that wound through the vineyards, and they now form the ‘route-des-vins’, a route of 170 Km that links all the most famous wine villages of Alsace. To give you an idea of scale, Wikipedia lists 67 wine-producing regions covered by the route-des-vins!
In recent years much of the route-des-vins has been dedicated as a cycling route. If you can imagine the prettiest stretches of the Côte-d’Or in Burgundy, as we cycle between Aloxe Corton and Savigny-les-Beaunes, or between Gevrey Chambertin and Nuits St Georges. The Alsace route-des-vins is more beautiful, with much more beautiful villages, and there’s over 100 miles of it! A cyclist’s dream.
