The Alsace Wine Route: Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé

Required Activities

• Walk the surviving north and west walls of Riquewihr, a rectangle of only 300 m by 220 m, and climb the five storeys of the Dolder — twenty-five metres, and its name means the highest point in Alsatian — to the museum on three of its floors, where the weapons run from the 15th to the 17th century and the rest is the tools of the wine trade

• Taste a riesling from the Schoenenbourg in a Riquewihr cellar, then walk out of the walls and up the slope it comes off — steep, facing due south, between 270 and 380 m, on gypsum-bearing Keuper marl — and note that every grand cru bunch in Alsace has to be picked by hand, which is why the rows are the width they are

• Walk up through the vines above Ribeauvillé to the three castles of the lords of Ribeaupierre and name all three on the ground — Saint-Ulrich, Girsberg and Haut-Ribeaupierre — which are protected not separately but as one group, listed in 1841 and again in 1930

• Find your way into the Tour des Voleurs at Riquewihr through the cour des Juifs and up the old stair on the rampart, and go down into the town's gaol with its oubliettes and its torture room — then remember what the townspeople asked their lord for in 1484: that they should not be shut in here any more, and that it be kept for outsiders