Wine tour 2012 - day 9

Today we drove to Mittlebergheim to visit Domaine Boeckel. This family had been working in Alsace for over 400 years and the current owner Emile Boeckel, came to greet us and showed us to the private tasting room. With some very good bread, we tasted a lot of different wines, including Cremant Chardonnay Extra Brut, Sylvaner VV, Riesling GC Zotzenberg, Pinot Gris GC Zotzenberg and Gewurztraminer VT. I was particularly impressed by the Sylvaner.

After that we went down to his cellar. Still maintained like more than 50 years ago, with a few modern stainless steel vats, we found they had kept a very large collection of old vintages. I then requested Emile to sell me an old vintage Sylvaner, which after some thoughts he agreed and got me a bottle of 1985 Sylvaner. Never had a Sylvaner so old, it was kept in the ideal condition so I was happy to get something unique. My friend Grace also got a old bottle and Emile was so kind to also give her another bottle for free!

Then we moved to another village, Bergheim. It was a small village still remained relatively untouched by tourists. Taking some nice photos there, we proceeded to Wistub du Sommelier for lunch. With perfect weather, we decided to dine outside and enjoyed the environment.

With a delicious meal behind us, we moved to the famous village of Riquewihr, producing one of the most famous wines in Alsace. Arriving there it was quite a surprise, with a lot of tourists walking around the small village. Comparing with the quiet and tranquility we just experienced in Bergheim, it was a total difference.

We stopped at one of the most famous producer in Alsace - Hugel & Fils. Always a big fan of this producer, I jumped in to start tasting all the wines, from the Classic, Tradition, Jubilee series, which most I have tasted before in HK. But my attention was always on the sweet wines, trying the different VT and SGN on offer. Struggling I finally bought a Riesling SGN 2000 "S", a special cuvee even for the special years in which SGN is made.

With some spare time, we walked around the village to buy more souvenirs. The village was actually quite small and it took a short time to go through all the shops, but still I was amazed by the number of people visiting. It was a bit too crowdy for my liking, so we decided to move on to the next stop - Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle.

Don't imagine the castle was something very grand. Located on the top of a hill, it was a relatively small settlement covering an inn, forge and mill, with the main castle spiraling up showing all the omni-present architectural designs like drawbridge, armory, cannons and so on.

We had a good time imagining ourselves as the noble in the castle, before leaving as it was already dusk and the castle was closing down. With enough exercise on the day, we headed back to Colmar to have dinner at Brasserie l'auberge du Bristol, just adjacent to the train station. Being the last dinner in Alsace, we had a 'sad' dinner as the next day we would have to split the group with two of us backing back home...

(to be continued...)