Another outstanding address, worth noting for an eventual trip to France, is the wonderfully picturesque Maison Kammerzell, just across the square from Strasbourg's celebrated cathedral. This four-hundred-year-old restaurant has recently been purchased by a group of the best wine producers of Alsace—the food is good, the wines are remarkable and fairly priced, and the kirsch de la maison altogether extraordinary.
Almost equally good and equally picturesque is the old Maison des Têtes in Colmar, a fine medieval mansion attractively made over and, like the Kammerzell, controlled by wine producers.
But everywhere, even in the smaller towns, the food is vastly better than average. And everywhere, at the end of one of those copious Alsatian luncheons, you are offered the whole gamme of magnificent Alsatian fruit brandies, potent, perfumed, colorless as water—kirsch, Quetsch, Mirabelle, framboise, fraise.
And everywhere, on every table, in their tall bottles, the green-gold, perfumed, delicate Alsatian wines.
This was planned as an article principally about the wines of Alsace, but it has taken me a little time to get around to my subject.
Most of the books on French wines, whether in French or in English, devote at most a sort of patronizing footnote, almost in the nature of an afterthought, to les vins d'Alsace. One would get the impression that they were wines of no consequence, unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Meursault, Chablis, white Hermitage, Vouvray, or Graves; that they were hopelessly inferior imitations of the wines of the “German Rhine”; that they were generally served in green glasses because they were “often cloudy”; that they were “flavored with elderberry blossoms”; that they “do not travel.”
Fortunately, there are a good many people, both in France and in this country, who like to drink wine and not just read about it. These people tasted Alsatian wines and liked them—the pundits to the contrary notwithstanding—and Alsatian wines, in twenty years, have acquired an acceptance and a popularity such as no other wines in the world have ever acquired in a comparable length of time. It is high time that a writer on wine accord to Riquewihr and Kaysersberg and Huesseren, to Bergheim and Ribeauvillé and Barr, the tribute that they have long deserved. And here goes:
Geographically speaking, Alsatian wines are Rhine wines—for the vineyards of Alsace, like a broad green ribbon a mile or two wide and forty miles long, stretch over the Vosges foothills that parallel the Rhine. Furthermore, in exposure and climate, in grape varieties and the all-important traditions of wine-making, Alsace is a great deal closer to Germany than to France. And yet no competent wine-taster would ever mistake an Alsatian for a German wine. They are, so to speak, an octave apart, which is another way of saying that they are different but that one is not necessarily better than the other.
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