Peace in wine country

My next stop was Colmar and the Alsace wine country.  This is in Eastern France, not far from Freiburg, Germany.  This area is filled with tiny towns from medieval times, on a smaller scale and more authentic than the romantic road. 


Colmar, the “big city” of the area, has a great historic center, which was fun to tour.  I was staying in a bed and breakfast in the home of a winemaker.  It was an old building with huge timbers and rooms tucked everywhere.  I had to go up and down several old wooden staircases to come to my room, which was tucked in a corner, but quite nice.  The town had cute canals, a large historic customs house for the merchants guild, the old tanners quarters where every house had many layers of roofs for sunning hides, and many areas previously held by other guilds. 

The highlight of the town history is the Unterlinden Museum, which contains the Isenheim Alterpiece by Matthias Grunewald.  It is an incredible piece of art, that has multiple panels that open like doors, with a carving on the center, all about 4 meters tall.  It was designed to help alleviate the suffering of those with ergotism, as they can look at it an understand the suffering of Christ as well as the glory surrounding him.  When the whole thing is closed, you see Christ dead on the cross, in a very stunning, dramatic manner.  His skin is covered with lesions, so those with skin diseases like ergotism can know he understands. 

You swing those panels open, and the center shows Mary holding baby Jesus, with a choir of angels, and the backs of the doors you just swung open show Jesus ecstatically raising from the tomb on one side, and Mary learning of her pregnancy on the other side.  You swing those doors open and see the carved alterpiece in the center, and the backs of the doors you just opened show the temptation and torture of St. Anthony.  It is all in brilliant Technicolor, and more dramatic than the average religious painting by far.  It has been taken apart, now, so tourists can view all sections without having to swing the ancient doors. 

After seeing the sights, I hung out with a cyclist from England who was doing a 2000 mile bicycle tour around Europe, then retired for an early night. 

The next morning, I woke up, had an excellent breakfast, rented a bike, and headed to wine country.  After consulting the tourist map, I headed south on the correct road out of town.  However, after about 10-15 minutes, the bike lane ended, the road was now a busy fast road, and there was no safe way to go.  Confused, I pulled out my bike map again, and realized that the scale was far smaller than I had thought.  I had already gone much, much further south than the town I was heading for.  I turned around and found my way down other roads to where I was headed.  Pretty soon I realized that my map was not nearly detailed enough for all of the small roads that turned here and there and everywhere.  For a short time, I had the fear that I would get terribly lost on a bicycle in French wine country, and never find my way back.  But, I proceeded anyway.

I rode out of one small town on a tiny road surrounded with grapes, toward the next town, ready to ride into the open air.  I went over one tiny hill, that took about 3 minutes to ride up, and the next town was right there!  Suddenly, I really understood the scale of where I was.  You can see every town from the town before.  There is a line of hills to the West and from any little hill you can see Colmar to the East.  It would be nearly impossible to get lost.  Thus, I was free to wander down any road to my hearts content! 

I wandered small towns, small enough that you could walk across the old walled section in less than five minutes.  The walls were long gone but the streets and church were still there.  I rode over the tall hills which have been growing grapes for a millennia.  I took tiny paths that cars could never go on, and equally tiny paths that somehow cars managed to traverse.  I could breathe in the air of 1000 years of wine making,.  And this time, the air had the fragrant scent of grapes!