Chocs Away: A Chocolate Themed Tour of Alsace by Clive Tully
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I’m walking along a damp tiled passage, flanked on either side by ranks of huge stainless steel cylinders with pipes and valves, all gleaming in the stark light from sodium lamps high up in the ceiling.
"Don't worry if you get drips fall on you,” announces Frank, my guide. “It's not acid, like in Alien!"
Helpful, that. We turn a corner, past a panel of high-tech flashing lights, and stoop as we enter a long narrow brick tunnel. At the end of it is something that speaks to me far more about where we are than the anonymous steelwork we’ve just passed. It’s a traditional wine cellar, with wooden casks big enough to park a car in. But the little tour around the Arthur Metz winery in Marlenheim is just the prelude to the main event.
Tantalise Your Taste Buds
I’m in Alsace, that delightful region of France on the German border where the locals speak French but the names of people and places are German, decent French wine and German beer can be found in the same hostelry, and where you can tantalise your taste buds with some of the finest chocolate anywhere.
Alsace has a well-established wine route, and the Arthur Metz winery is one of the attractions, but now there’s a chocolate route as well. So I’m here for a little tasting to see how the local wine and choccie go together. “I think this is a particularly good match,” says Frank as he pours me a glass of Crémant, a sparkling wine made from Chardonnay grapes. With it I sample a square of Saint Domingue, a dark chocolate made from 70% cocoa, rich and spicy, and – as they say in the trade – long on the palate.
We then whiz through a number of other wines – in fact we do 10 in all, and given my reluctance to use the spittoon, it ends up quite a session, and all before lunchtime! Dry wines tend to work better with chocolate, and as we road test another one – this time a Madagascar made from 64% cocoa – I learn from Frank that Arthur Metz exports quite a lot of its wines to Aldi and Lidl in the UK. Not always blindingly apparent from the labels, but look for the letters “AM”, I’m told.
The Chocolate Theme
The chocolate theme continues throughout lunch in the nearby Restaurant Le Cerf, where a modest five-course affair features chocolate in one form or another in every course. What a lot of people don’t realise is that chocolate in its natural form isn’t sweet at all, and actually makes a rather fine sauce to go with a meat dish. It certainly perks up my venison.
Strasbourg is the main city of Alsace, and as you wander around its beautiful medieval centre (the historic Grande Île was the first city centre to be made a UNESCO World Heritage Site), you can happily forget the fact that for one week in every month, several hundred sponging MEPs meet up in the modern parliament building on the outskirts.
After a tour of the pink sandstone Gothic cathedral with its famous astronomical clock, I check out the adjacent ancient restaurant Maison Kammerzell. The traditional local dish is fish sauerkraut – halibut, salmon and haddock on a bed of sauerkraut. Absolutely delicious, and I guess, very healthy, too.
Gently Rolling to Hilly
The landscape of Alsace varies from gently rolling to hilly, and while the most important river of the area is the Rhine, you can find real tranquillity on a much smaller watercourse called the Ill. To the north of Strasbourg, between here and the Rhine is a flat marshy area called the Grand Ried, and it’s at Ehnwihr that I board a flat-bottomed boat made from mountain pine and oak.
Doing the driving is Boatman Patrick Unterstock, and while what we’re on is essentially a punt, Patrick stands at the front rather than the back, just providing the odd bit of steering while the River Ill’s lazy current takes us slowly downstream. It’s like being in another world, at times with expansive views across reed beds from which the area gains its name, at others with us ducking to avoid the low branches of trees overhanging the river. At one point we tie up and walk through some trees to discover the crazy tangle of branches of a beaver dam.
There are muskrats here as well, but one other species along the river is perhaps not quite so welcome – I see several coypus emerging from burrows in the river bank. Most magical for me is the number of gossamer-winged dragonflies dancing across the water, sparkling in the sunlight. Patrick spots a piece of polystyrene floating in the water, and manoeuvres the boat so he can pick it up. “I don’t like to see plastic in the river,” he says. Clearly Patrick is the best asset the River Ill has.
The Secrets of Chocolate
Just outside Strasbourg, in Geispolsheim, is the “Secrets of Chocolate” Museum. I vaguely remember from school that cocoa originated in Mexico, but here they explain a whole lot more besides, tracing the history of chocolate and the way it’s manufactured. While the museum is relatively new at six years old, the animated mannequins in some of the historical tableaux have a rather delightful 50s quality to them. And rather like a brewery tour that ends with a tasting, here you wind up seeing how hollow chocolate bunnies are made, and getting to sample some of the wares of the factory next door.
They even make me a personalised bar sporting my name. The intention, and I’m not fibbing here, is to take it home to save for a special occasion. Unfortunately I fail to account for the perils of transporting chocolate in a heatwave. Guess I’ll just have to go back for some more…
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