The Route des Vins d'Alsace, opened in 1953, runs 170 kilometres from Marlenheim in the north to Thann in the south — and the road itself has never charged a centime, with free access to the public road and wine villages, though individual activities may vary. That road threads the foothills of the Vosges, where a rain shadow leaves Colmar among the driest towns in France. Vines were planted here under Roman administration. Monastic orders extended them through the Middle Ages, and by the sixteenth century Alsatian wine travelled the Rhine to Amsterdam and London. War interrupted the trade twice. The vineyards passed between France and Germany four times in seventy-five years, and the modern appellation system — AOC Alsace in 1962, the fifty-one Grands Crus delimited from 1975 — was built on ground that had been replanted almost from scratch. Travellers searching for alsace wine tasting strasbourg are, in practice, looking at a landscape reassembled within living memory. Seven grape varieties define it: Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Muscat, Pinot Blanc, Sylvaner and Pinot Noir. Alsace remains the only French region to label predominantly by variety rather than village, a German habit retained in French hands. The tall green-stemmed flûte d'Alsace bottle is written into law. Terroir shifts sharply over short distances — granite at Brand above Turckheim, limestone at Rangen de Thann, marl and sandstone between — which is why a dégustation de vins d'Alsace can move from steely to honeyed within a single morning. The villages carry the same layered inheritance. Riquewihr survived the Thirty Years' War with its ramparts intact. Eguisheim arranges its houses in concentric rings around a former castle. Kaysersberg was Albert Schweitzer's birthplace. Above them, Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle was restored between 1900 and 1908 for Kaiser Wilhelm II, a Hohenzollern statement in pink Vosges sandstone at 757 metres. Cellars beneath these towns are frequently vaulted, cool and centuries old, some still holding foudres of oak carved with vintage dates. Strasbourg sits at the northern hinge of all this, thirty minutes from the first cru. Its Grande Île is UNESCO-listed; its sandstone cathedral was the world's tallest building until 1874. Wine defined the city's medieval economy as surely as its printing presses. Guided alsace wine tasting strasbourg tours simply follow a commercial corridor that has existed for two thousand years, from cooperage and harvest to glass.