La Route des VinsAlsace.

The best-preserved medieval market town in Alsace — the Place du Marché with its 16th-century corn market, the six-bucket well (the most distinctive well in Alsace), the Kapelturm (chapel tower), and the surrounding half-timbered buildings forming a square that functions as the civic and commercial centre exactly as it did 500 years ago. Unlike many Alsatian towns, Obernai escaped the destruction of 1944 and retains genuine medieval fabric rather than reconstruction. The ramparts are largely intact with watchtowers. The Tuesday and Saturday market fills the Place du Marché.

The most visited castle in Alsace — a medieval fortress on a 755-metre Vosges summit commanding the Rhine plain, destroyed by the Swedes in 1633 and restored by Kaiser Wilhelm II between 1900 and 1908. The restoration is historically significant: the architect Bodo Ebhardt was given the task of reconstructing a medieval castle according to the best Wilhelmine ideas of what medieval castles looked like. The result is less a restoration than a vision of medievalism — accurate in some details, invented in others, and a monument to early 20th-century historicism that is now itself a historical document. The views over the Rhine plain, the Vosges, and on clear days to the Alps are the best in Alsace.

The most visited village on the Route des Vins — a single main street (Rue du Général de Gaulle) flanked by half-timbered houses from the 14th to 17th centuries, completely enclosed within its medieval walls, survived WWII without damage because it was declared an open town. The village is small (1,200 inhabitants, 1.5 million visitors per year) and tourist-saturated by 11:00 — arrive before 09:00 or after 17:00 when the coach tours leave. The surrounding Grand Cru vineyard Schoenenbourg produces what many consider the finest dry Riesling in Alsace. Buy direct from Dopff au Moulin or Hugel et Fils (both houses established in the village for 400 years).

Alsace produces seven AOC wine varieties on the same strip of land: Riesling (the flagship — steely, mineral, age-worthy, the most Alsatian), Gewurztraminer (intensely aromatic, rose petal and lychee, unmistakable), Pinot Gris (rich, smoky, powerful), Muscat d'Alsace (dry, aromatic, aperitif style), Sylvaner (light, everyday), Pinot Blanc (versatile, unoaked), and Pinot Noir (the only red, increasingly respected). The 51 Grand Cru vineyards are labelled by their specific hillside site — Schlossberg, Rangen, Brand, Rosacker — rather than by château, making Alsace wine the most terroir-focused in France. All Alsace wine comes in the distinctive tall flûte d'Alsace bottle.

The most complete Alsatian wine village that is also a living town rather than a tourist stage set — Kaysersberg (Kaiser's mountain) has a castle ruin, a fortified bridge (the only one remaining in Alsace), a Renaissance fountain, half-timbered houses spanning six centuries, and the birthplace house of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), the theologian, musician and physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. The wine here (particularly from the Grand Cru Schlossberg vineyard) is produced by some of the most respected vignerons on the route. Less coach-tour saturated than Riquewihr because it has a functioning town around the tourist infrastructure.

The Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516, Matthias Grünewald) is a polyptych altarpiece of overwhelming emotional force — painted for the monastery hospital at Isenheim where patients with ergotism (a gangrenous disease caused by a fungal infection of rye) were treated. The central panel shows the Crucifixion as a medical horror: Christ's body twisted in agony, his skin covered in pustules and lacerations that mirror the symptoms of ergotism, painted with an intensity of suffering that has no parallel in Western art. The altarpiece opens to reveal two further scenes; the exterior panels alone have occupied art historians for five centuries. Arrive at opening time and allow two hours.

Colmar's old town is a dense concentration of the Alsatian half-timbered style at its most exuberant — each building painted in a different colour (ochre, rose, green, sky blue), the upper floors corbelled out over the street, the carved wooden corner posts depicting saints and monsters. The Quartier des Tanneurs (tanners' quarter) and the Petite Venise canal district are the most photographed, but the streets between — particularly the Rue des Marchands with its Maison Pfister (1537, the most ornate house in Alsace) and the Ancienne Douane (the customs house, 1480) — are the architectural core. Colmar was spared in 1944 by a rapid US Army advance that bypassed its defences.

A military road built by the French Army in 1914–1915 to supply the Vosges front without crossing ground visible from German positions — running along the ridge of the Vosges between 800 and 1,300 metres, with the Rhine plain and the wine villages visible to the east and the Lorraine plateau visible to the west. In peacetime it is one of the most dramatic scenic drives in eastern France. The Grand Ballon (1,424m, the highest summit in the Vosges) is reached by a short walk from the road; the view from the summit on a clear day extends to the Alps, the Black Forest and, in exceptional visibility, the Swiss Jura.