2018-06-26 Alsace Wine Route Wassler, Northalten to Blienschwiller

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Our Route Wassler, Northalten to Blienschwiller

Alsace Wine Route by Motorhome

A brilliant sunny day at Domaine Wassler in Northalten, up later than usual around 9 am, we have breakfast and can’t decide whether to move on or not, this place is very good. After breakfast we wandered around the town of Northalten looking at the wine producers’ shops etc, some appeared to be open and others not. Some say Vente Direct which is the equivalent of wholesale only, other Vente en Detailwhich is retail – useful to know, especially when you throw in the Grand Cru specialists where you know that the wines will be more costly. It’s hard to know what was going on in the sense that there were no other people wandering about, so how does the town survive? Maybe we were out too early in the day or season, who knows.

The two wine sellers that we decided to try were both closed for lunch, so in the end we decided to move on down the road. We serviced the Hymer, purchased another 6 bottles of wine, a Lucas special blend 60% Pinot Gris, 30% Riesling and 10% Gewurtztraminer, a deliciously floral wine.

We moved just 1.5 miles along the road to another wine producer who had a field available for motorhomes, a young man invited us to a degustation at 1800 because he was going out to work on the vines. We parked on the field, and needed both our extension cables to connect to the electricity point, about 35m away. Generally, French electric hookup points are centralised, so you often need very long cables. We wandered around the town, but nothin was open, maybe they were all working on the vines.

The young man who conducted the tasting at Spitz winery spoke very good English, he had worked for 3 months in New Zealand on vines there. His grandfather had planted the vines here. The wines were much to our liking, we purchased a lot, including Grand Cru, which is much more expensive than our normal purchases. After the tasting we drank a bottle of the Grand Cru, it really was excellent.