Busy history, border identity flavor every Alsace aspect

Still, I fret that they haven’t experienced enough — perhaps a hike that follows an Alsatian fairy tale to Ferrette’s Cave of Dwarfs, or another that weaves through German and French World War I bunkers near a rocky spur above Cernay. Yet they assure me they have hit the high points of Alsace, including tasting stops along the 110-mile Route de Vin, or Wine Road, and a peek into a few castle ruins, of which there are about 100 relatively intact.

While short-stay tourists often leave feeling content, the people who live here tell me the rest of France still has trouble embracing the culture of Alsace, a 30-mile-wide ribbon of land bordered by the Vosges Mountains to the west, Germany and the Rhine to the east, and Switzerland along the southeastern edge. Laurence Winter, an Alsatian-born author, wrote a book, which was turned into a popular stage comedy, about surviving when your husband is transferred to Alsace — often stereotyped as a German outpost with heavy food and strange accents.

It is one of three French regions — along with Brittany and Corsica — that has preserved a strong, separate identity and language, in spite of its war-ravaged history. While my butcher in Hégehneim speaks French to me, he and older villagers instinctively lapse into a German dialect known as Alsatian — a version of what Alemannic tribes brought here around the fifth century. Although rarely formally written, it survived as France and what would become Germany fought for control of Alsace a half dozen times from the mid-1600s until the end of World War II. Just before Germany occupied this region in 1940, about a third of the Alsatian population was evacuated to southwest France, where most learned French for the first time.

“It’s true, over the years we have switched identities and been between two cultures, but there’s an attachment to our Alsatian roots, like the roots of the vineyard, that is profound,’’ said Christian Beyer, who represents his family’s 14th generation of winemakers in the tiny medieval town of Eguisheim.