The Route des Vins d'Alsace was waymarked in 1953, which makes it the oldest signposted wine road in France. It runs roughly 170 kilometres, from Marlenheim in the north to Thann in the south, threading through some 119 wine-growing communes. Most travellers meet the corridor on an Alsace Wine Route Tour from Strasbourg, since the city sits a short drive from its northern gate. The road itself is public: no gate, no barrier, no closing hour. The vines occupy a narrow bench between the Vosges foothills and the Rhine plain. The mountains block Atlantic weather, leaving Colmar among the driest towns in France, with roughly 500 millimetres of rain a year. Geologists count thirteen distinct soil formations along the strip — granite, limestone, marl, sandstone, volcanic sediment. That fractured ground explains the 51 Grands Crus, each one a delimited parcel of land rather than an estate. Seven grape varieties are authorised: Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Muscat, Sylvaner, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Noir. Alsace remains the only French region to label most bottles by grape rather than by village. The villages record a contested border in stone. Riquewihr keeps its Dolder gate tower of 1291 and a double ring of ramparts that survived the Thirty Years' War. Eguisheim is laid out in concentric rings around the castle of its counts. Ribeauvillé sits beneath three ruined fortresses of the Ribeaupierre family. Above them stands Haut-Koenigsbourg, a twelfth-century ruin rebuilt between 1900 and 1908 by the architect Bodo Ebhardt for Wilhelm II, when the region was German territory. Half-timbered façades, oriel windows and Renaissance wellheads repeat from one village to the next. Storks nest on the church roofs, reintroduced after the local population fell to nine pairs in 1974. Today the corridor carries working agriculture as much as visitors. Holdings are small, often under ten hectares, and the grower's name is usually the one on the cellar door. Access costs nothing — the entrance fee is 0 EUR — and the route is open 00:00–23:59 every day, though villages keep village hours. The address is simply Route des Vins d'Alsace, 68000, Alsace, France. Guided Alsace Wine Route Tour from Strasbourg tours exist for a narrower reason: a vehicle for the distance between villages, a driver who is not tasting, and a line through the Grand Cru slopes of Schoenenbourg and Rosacker that a road map does not explain. Alsace vineyard day trips and medieval villages tours use the same public tarmac as everyone else.