Page 1 of 3
A village? No! Itīs a capital. The capital of Alsatian wine. Cheery, good-natured, lively, and breathtakingly beautiful - itīs well worth taking a discovery stroll through Colmar.
Itīs a country city, the kind Alphonse Allais dreamed of: built in the country, on the Ried plain, the alluvia of the Rhine at its doorstep, the blue line of the Vosges mountains like a sentry watching over it, with the Fecht and Lauch Rivers to gaze in. A city? Not really.
Ginette Humbrecht who, with her son, Olivier, and her husband, Leonard, runs the most modern vineyard in the area, on the Turckheim plain, says with a chuckle, "I couldnīt just show up in the center of Strasbourg in my boots, straight from the vines! In the morning, we work in the vineyard. And then, on the spur of the moment, we might come into town and shop at our leisure." In a nutshell, Colmar is a homey town.
The wine barons can go on boasting about their flowerful villages of Eguisheim "the cradle," and Riquewihr "the pearl," but Colmar is where we live, dine, meet up for a drink, and especially, where the decisions about the future of the wine business (trading, marketing and laws) are made.
"Alsace and Corsica are the only two regions of France," remarks Jean-Michel Deiss, "where the regional council of the National Institute of Appellations dīOrigine (INAO) makes its own, independent decisions. Parisī role is limited to approving the decisions." And the Alsatian INAO is located in Colmar, as is the CIVA, the Alsatian Wine Commission, which assembles the many winegrower-owners, traders and coops which, in turn, unify the well-established individual producers.
History and geography have left their mark - clearly and indelibly. As early as the Middle Ages, Colmar sent wine from its tiny Horbourg-Wihr port to the far reaches of Eastern Europe. For the last 35 years, the charismatic, Picard-born character from western France, Pierre Bouard, has been the kingpin of the wine industry. As an outsider, he manages to avoid provoking local quarrels as he unites the vineyard barons, the main wine cellar coops and individualistic-minded producers.
Colmar and its Rhine tributaries, the Fecht and Lauch Rivers, Colmar and its museums (the Unterlinden Museum repository - of the Issenheim altarpiece - is the most visited French museum outside of Paris), Colmar and its three millions annual tourists: these are well-known facts. People come here to see the house of the sculptor, Bartholdi, who created the world-illuminating Statue of Liberty. People gather before the house where Jean-Jacques Waltz, nicknamed Hansi, was born. He was the caricaturist, regionalist and patriot whose shop signs adorn the streets of Colmar. Examples are the Zimmerlin butcherīs sign, the Fincker brothersī with a depiction of St. Anthony tempted by the pig, the tricolor kougelhopf adorning Martin Musslinīs shop and that of General Kleber.
Prev -
Next >>
to the top
print this page
recommend this page