Less than half a mile from the Place Kléber, which is the busy heart of what is once more Strasbourg and no longer Strassburg, there is a little island in the tranquil river Ill. Old and charming and very picturesque, with narrow streets and half-timbered houses, this island is called, affectionately and a little nostalgically, La Petite France.
“La Petite France,” as a matter of fact, would be an excellent name for the whole province of Alsace. Alsatians, among themselves, may speak a sort of Plattdeutsch patois, but they are as French at heart as any Parisians, and they will point out to you, at the drop of a hat, that even the “Marseillaise” was written in Strasbourg. Nevertheless, to an outsider their province seems a French dependency, a French colony, rather than part of France. From almost every village, in clear weather, you can see the pine-covered hills of Germany, like storm clouds, ominous and dark along the eastern horizon. And Alsace is basically a sort of border country, cut off from the rest of France by the high wooded barriers of the Vosges.
So, to an Alsatian, Frenchmen from Paris or Lyons or even Nancy are “des gens de l'Intérieur,” people from the Interior, brothers but strangers. Last summer, in a town near Colmar, I asked an old lady where her son had gone.
“Eh ben,” she replied, “il est parti pour la France.” He had gone to France.
People who were born before 1870 in Alsace (and despite three wars, there are a good many of them) have had five alternating changes of nationalities—French to begin with, German from 1870 to 1919, French until 1940, German for five long bitter years, and once more French again.
In the past three decades, France has twice reconquered her “lost province”, in the same thirty years, gastronomically speaking, Alsace has conquered France. Alsatian wines, utterly unknown in Paris in 1920, are now outselling Chablis and Graves. Choucroute, a mild sauerkraut served with ham and frankfurter, has become as much of a midday or midnight staple in Paris as onion soup. Strasbourg has replaced Périgueux and Toulouse as the main source of foie gras. Strawberries, even in French provincial towns, are often served with kirsch. If you ask a waiter in Bordeaux for a Mirabelle, he knows what you want and gives it to you. There has not been much good Alsatian beer in circulation since 1939, but Rhine salmon and Vosges trout au bleu are served, when you can get them, as part and parcel of La Grande Cuisine Française.
Before the war, Alsace was an incomparable paradise for a poor and hungry traveler. For a dollar or thereabouts, you could get trout and pheasant and foie gras in any one of a hundred Alsatian restaurants. At Valentin Sorg's in Strasbourg, you ate about as well as anywhere in the world. And even in these difficult postwar days, good food is far easier to come by in Alsace than in any province of any of the belligerent countries, for Alsace is a wonderfully self-sufficient little land, producing more of almost everything (even sugar and tobacco and automobiles) than she needs. There is timber aplenty on the slopes of the Vosges, and the factory towns, like Mulhouse and Molsheim, are prosperous. For mile after fertile mile between Strasbourg and the Swiss border, the Rhine valley is one great orchard, and the land is rich and good. The children in the villages, even now, are fat and rosy-cheeked and obviously well fed. They should be—for the gastronomic resources of the Alsatian countryside are almost limitless. There are crayfish as well as trout in every one of the noisy little streams that hurry down out of the Vosges. There is no better country for hunting in western Europe, and you find pheasant and woodcock, snipe and venison and wild boar listed on ordinary restaurant menus just as if they were ordinary fare. At the little Hotel Beau-Site in Orbey, back of Colmar, in the early autumn of 1946, I was served one of the best meals of my life—hors d'oeuvres that covered two large tables, delicate truites au bleu, their flesh fine and firm under their indigo skins, a superb pheasant, admirable Muenster cheese, and, to top it all, a vast construction of ice cream, Chantilly, meringue, and almond paste, known as a vacherin.
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.
Let me hasten to add that Alsace has never produced, and probably never will produce, a Schloss Johannisberger, a Berncasteler Doktor, a Scharzhofberger, or a Forster Jesuitengarten. From 1870 until 1918, Alsatian vintners, whose wines were unknown in what was then their native Germany, concentrated on the production of cheap, sound table wines. For the last thirty years they have been concentrating, with outstanding success, on the production of wines which are fine and yet in a middle-price class. Leaving the great estate-bottled Rhines and Moselles out of consideration, Alsatian wines since 1930 have been as good, as sound, as well made, and as fairly priced as their principal competitors, the German commercial wines—the Niersteiners, Laubenheimers, Hochheimers, and Liebfraumilchs which one could find in the average store or restaurant. Incidentally, this may be as good a time as any to repeat once more what many of us have learned: that Liebfraumilch can be excellent or fair or downright bad, since the name “Liebfraumilch” has no geographical or legal meaning whatsoever.
Alsatian wine names, on the other hand, mean a great deal, and Alsatian labels are about the most explicit of any now in circulation. In general, you have a right to expect on the label of a bottle of vin d'Alsace three things: a vintage year, the name of the town in which the wine was produced, and the grape variety of which it was made. A few vineyards, perhaps half a dozen in all, have acquired a special eminence, and wines from the Kaeferkopf (outside Ammerschwihr), like those of the Kanzlerberg (outside Bergheim) and of Clos Ste. Odile (near Barr), are sold under the name of their vineyard rather than under that of their village. But these are exceptions.
Here is a brief check list of the outstanding wine-producing villages of Alsace, with asterisks indicating my own evaluation of their respective excellence (no official classification exists). It goes without saying that poor wine can be made in the best of districts, but by and large wines bottled by producers in these towns will be better than wines produced or bottled elsewhere. The villages are listed from north to south.
Marlenheim—produces little white wine but a fresh and agreeable rosé, made from Pinot Noir grapes.
*Goxwiller—most of the vineyards of this little commune are a mile or so west of the village proper, and not far from Barr. Rieslings and Pinots Gris from Goxwiller are often remarkable.
**Barr—the best wine-producing commune in northern Alsace—celebrated for its Rieslings, its Traminers, and its Pinots Gris. Monsieur Hering of Barr is the dean of Alsatian wine-growers, and some of his best wines are really astonishing. Klipfel is another name to remember.
*Mittelbergheim—a very large production of wines of every category, from ordinary to very fine. Boeckel is the principal shipper.
Dambach—sound table wines for the most part; a few worthwhile exceptions.
**Bergheim—one of the real premiers crus of Alsace; Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, and Pinots Gris of the highest class. Lorentz and Muller are two of the best producers.
*Ribeauvillé—a fairly important wine town, but many of the wines which have helped to make its reputation come from nearby Bergheim or from Hunawihr, even nearer.
**Hunawihr—an extremely picturesque tiny village, perched on a vineyard-covered hill. Excellent wines.
*Zellenberg—another hilltop village with good wines.
**Riquewihr—an ancient walled town, no less remarkable for its medieval beauty than Germany's Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber. A large production of consistently above-average wines, Rieslings especially. Hugel and Schmidt are among the best-known producers; Dopff-Irion and Ernest Preiss are the largest.
*Mittelwihr—almost completely destroyed in the war. The large Camille Preiss cellars are nevertheless functioning. Some rosé wines are produced in addition to the conventional whites.
**Ammerschwihr—an utterly charming village in 1939; today, little more than a tragic pile of rubble. Fortunately, the vineyards were not much damaged, and they are among the best of Alsace. Kuehn is a shipper to remember.
**Kaysersberg—Gewurztraminers and Rieslings of top quality. Most of the vineyards are actually in the adjoining village of Kientzheim. Faller and Schwarz are bottlers worthy of especial mention.
*Eguisheim—a village south of Colmar. Beyer is a name to remember, but most of Eguisheim's best wines come from the hillsides nearer to…
**Husseren-les-Chateaux—a fine old town with three ruined castles. Its steep vineyards yield exceptionally fine wines. Kuentz-Bas is a particularly good shipper.
*Voegtlinshoffen—produces very light wines of unusual finesse. You might note in particular the name of Joseph Cattin.
*Guebwiller—may perhaps deserve**, for some of its best Traminers and Rieslings are hard to beat.
In buying wines from the majority of French vineyard districts, we thirsty Americans can generally afford to remain in blissful ignorance of the grape varieties out of which the various wines are made. Pommard and Chablis and Château Yquem, according to both tradition and law, can come from certain kinds of grapes and from no others. There is probably not one Frenchman in five hundred who knows the difference between Pinot Noir and Pinot Chardonnay, or between Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. On the other hand, Alsatian wines, like the best wines from California, are sold under varietal names—or grape names. As often as not an Alsatian producer will have in his vineyard four or five different kinds of grapes and will make from each one a wholly distinctive and characteristic wine. You do not have to be a professional taster, by any means, to tell the difference between a Gewurztraminer and a Riesling, or between a Pinot Gris and a Sylvaner, even if they come from the same vineyard. Quite properly, therefore, Alsatian wines usually carry on their labels not only the name of the village from which they come, but also the name of the grape out of which they are made. Here, in approximate order of excellence, are the cépages (or grape varieties) of Alsace.
Riesling—this is certainly one of the two greatest white wine grapes in the world. It is responsible for all of the wines of the Moselle and Saar, and practically all those of the Rheingau. In Alsace it yields wines that are clean, fragrant, full-bodied, of exceptional finesse.
Gewurztraminer—really nothing more than a selected Traminer (see below), “gewurz” meaning “spicy.” Wines with a special, inimitable, pronounced bouquet, flowery almost to the point of being really spicy, and unmistakable.
Traminer—a less pronounced and often a little blander version of the preceding Gewurztraminer.
Pinot Gris—also known as the Rulander, and occasionally, for no good reason, as the Tokay. It produces wines of great delicacy, of less bouquet than the Gewurztraminer and the Riesling, but of almost classic distinction.
Pinot Blanc—also known as the Klevener. Little grown but invariably good.
Note: All of the preceding are known as Edeltrauben, of which the correct French translation is plants nobles, or “noble” (as distinguished from “common”) varieties. In Alsace, however, the German edel is considered the equivalent of the old French gentil … the term “Gentil” on a label means a blend of wines made from superior grape varieties or, in Alsatian patois, an Edelzwicker. A Zwicker is a blend of common wines and has no precise French equivalent.
Sylvaner—considerably more productive than the true Riesling, though sometimes called the Franken Riesling in Germany. Yields excellent lesser wines, generally short-lived but delightful when young and fresh.
Chasselas—extremely productive, a mediocre grape which provides most of the pleasant cheap vin ordinaire of Alsace. You will never see this grape name on a label.
Burger—now being eliminated. Another mediocre grape used only for the production of common table wine.
Like Moselles, and like the lesser German wines of the Rhine, Alsatian wines are at their sprightly and charming best when young. Even stored under the most favorable conditions, they tend to lose, with time, more than they gain. Most of the better producers now bottle their superior vintages when under a year old, and send them to market a few months later. The 1945's, for example, are already mature and excellent, and quite comparable to the fine 1942's and 1943's in quality. 1946, too, was a good year, and its wines are both plentiful and very promising.
Vintages, in Alsace, are of primary importance, and it is fairly safe to assume that any wine which does not carry a vintage is the product of a poor year, and as thin and sour as only a bad vin d'Alsace can be. Avoid, therefore, all recent years except 1937, 1942, 1943, 1945, and 1946.
As a whole, Alsatian wines are perhaps the best values of any French wines now being shipped to this country. Dry and light, fragrant, refreshing, comparatively low in alcohol, they are among the pleasantest wines for warm weather in the world.