A Road Trip Through the Beautiful Alsace Region in the Fall Months

Where To Go On an Alsace Road Trip in Fall

Fall is that lovely time between the hectic and hot summer months and the busy winter months when the Christmas markets put on their festive finery. These are my top pics for an Autumn trip.

Strasbourg

You can’t go to the Alsace region without visiting Strasbourg. There is so much to see and do in this city. The cathedral, Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874, and its astronomical clock still performs its noon procession of the apostles at 12:30 sharp. 

Walk from the cathedral down toward Petite France, the old tanners’ quarter along the Ill. The steep roofs there were built that way because the tanners needed the attic space open to the air to dry hides, and the smell in the 16th century would have been pungent to say the least. Let’s just say that air wasn’t just for drying 

Today it’s all restaurants and half-timbered guesthouses reflecting in the water, and it really is pretty. The four square towers of the Ponts Couverts date to the 13th century and were part of the city’s defensive walls.

For lunch, skip the places on the main tourist drag and try a proper winstub. Chez Yvonne on Rue du Sanglier has been serving Alsatian classics since 1873, and their choucroute garnie is one of the best I’ve ever had. 

A winstub, if you haven’t come across the word before, is a wine tavern, historically where growers sold their own bottles alongside home cooking. The tradition is specifically Alsatian and worth seeking out wherever you stop.

The Wine Route

The Route des Vins d’Alsace runs about 105 miles from Marlenheim in the north to Thann. October is harvest time, so you’ll see tractors on the road, grape bins outside every cellar, and hand-painted signs offering tastings that weren’t there in September. 

Give yourself two or three days if you can.

Obernai is the first stop out of Strasbourg. The market square has a 16th-century well with six buckets, a belfry that was once part of a demolished church, and a Renaissance town hall. 

What I’d push you toward is walking the ramparts, which are largely intact and give you a proper sense of what a medieval Alsatian town looked like when it was still under threat of attack.

Ribeauvillé and Riquewihr are the two most-photographed villages on the route, but don’t miss Hunawihr. It’s tiny, has a fortified church from the 15th century that Catholics and Protestants have shared for over 300 years under a rare arrangement called a simultaneum, and the vineyards climb right up to the churchyard wall. 

The other one to slip in is Andlau, further north. It has an abbey founded in 880 by Richardis, the estranged wife of Emperor Charles the Fat, who, according to legend, was led to the site by a bear. 

The Romanesque frieze around the abbey church door is one of the finest in Alsace, with hunting scenes, mythical creatures, and human figures that have been debated by art historians for over a century. 

The village itself is a working wine village with several excellent growers, including Domaine Marc Kreydenweiss, who has been making biodynamic wines here since the 1980s.

Colmar and the Isenheim Altarpiece

Colmar is prettier than Strasbourg, and you really will feel as though you’ve stepped into a picture postcard. The Petite Venise quarter with its flower-lined canals is exactly what people picture when they think of Alsace. 

Don’t miss the Musée Unterlinden inside a former Dominican convent on Place Unterlinden. The Isenheim Altarpiece was painted by Matthias Grünewald between roughly 1512 and 1516 for the Antonite monastery at Isenheim, a hospital order that treated victims of ergotism, a horrific disease caused by fungus-contaminated rye. 

The painting was designed for those patients. The Christ figure is covered in the same sores and lesions the sick would have recognized on their own bodies, and the panels open to reveal increasingly hopeful scenes as the church calendar progressed. 

While you’re in Colmar, walk the Quartier des Tanneurs and try baeckeoffe, a slow-cooked casserole of three meats marinated in Riesling that was originally left at the baker’s oven on wash day, or fleischschnacka, a pasta roll stuffed with leftover pot-au-feu meat. 

Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg and Vosges to the Struthof 

Now for the ones I’d add if you have the time. First, drive up to the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, which sits at 2,500 feet on a spur above the plain. It was originally built in the 12th century, destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, and reconstructed between 1900 and 1908 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, when Alsace was part of the German Empire. 

The reconstruction is theatrical and has been mocked by purists for over a century, but on a misty October morning with the vineyards below disappearing into fog, it’s remarkable. Get there when it opens.

Second, and this is the one I’d really push you toward, drive west into the Vosges to the Struthof concentration camp memorial, the only Nazi concentration camp built on French soil, as the others were transit camps. 

It operated from 1941 to 1944, and around 22,000 people died there, mostly Resistance fighters, political prisoners, and Jewish prisoners used in medical experiments at the nearby Reichsuniversität Strassburg. The site is preserved as a national memorial and includes the gas chamber a mile down the road at the former Struthof hotel. 

If you love cheese, I’d also drive down through the Vallée de Munster. The valley gave its name to the cheese, which was made by Irish monks who settled here in the 7th century, and there are still fermier producers you can visit. It’s delicious, especially with a glass of Gewürztraminer.

North to Wissembourg and the German Border

The northern stretch, called the Alsace Bossue in parts and the Outre-Forêt in others, has fewer visitors, older forests, and villages where you’ll find plenty of Franco-German history.

Wissembourg sits right on the German border and has a Gothic abbey church that’s the second-largest in Alsace after Strasbourg Cathedral. 

The old town wraps around the Lauter river with fortified walls, a working watermill, and a house on Rue du Chapitre where the exiled Polish king Stanislas Leszczynski lived from 1719 to 1725 before his daughter Marie married Louis XV and he moved to more comfortable quarters. 

Stop for a coffee on the Place de la République and watch how many people cross over into Germany for the afternoon.

On the way back south, stop at Hunspach, which was voted France’s favorite village in 2020 and is one of the few in Alsace where every house is whitewashed rather than painted the usual colors. The bulging bottle-glass windows are an 18th-century local particularity you don’t see elsewhere. 

Nearby, the Fort de Schoenenbourg is the largest visitable section of the Maginot Line, the fortified system France built between the wars to stop a German invasion. It didn’t work, of course, but walking the underground galleries with their original 1930s equipment is quite an experience.

Alsace in October

October is harvest month, and the whole region shifts gears for it. The Fête des Vendanges in Barr, usually held on the first weekend of October, is one of the older harvest festivals, featuring a costumed parade, the crowning of the harvest queen, and free tastings from local growers in the town square. 

Barr itself is a serious wine town, home to Domaine Klipfel and several Grand Cru sites, and the festival is a working local event rather than a staged one for visitors.

Marlenheim, at the northern end of the wine route, holds its Fête du Mariage de l’Ami Fritz in mid-August, so you’ll miss that, but the same town’s harvest weekend in October is a much quieter affair. 

The town of Molsheim hosts Molsheim’s Messti, a traditional autumn fair with roots dating back to the 14th-century patron saint’s day, usually held on the first weekend of October. Rides for children, sausages, and mulled wine.

For something specifically October, look for a soirée flammekueche in any wine village. Flammekueche, or tarte flambée, is Alsace’s answer to pizza, a thin dough topped with fromage blanc, onions, and lardons, cooked in a wood oven for about two minutes. 

In autumn, growers open their cellars for evenings where they serve flammekueche straight from the oven with the year’s new wine, still slightly sweet and fizzing. Ask at any tourism office, and someone will point you to the nearest one.

One last October thing. The forests around Munster, the Vosges du Nord, and the slopes above the wine route turn a beautiful gold in the second half of the month, and the ridge road called the Route des Crêtes, built by the French army during the First World War for military supply, gives you the drive of a lifetime through it.

Start early and take a picnic. If the mist is down in the valleys, which it often is in October, you’ll come out above it into the sun, with the Alps visible on a clear day and the whole plain of Alsace hidden under white below.