Mittelbergheim

Mittelbergheim is a village of about 650 people on the Alsace wine route, just south of Barr and 30 km from Strasbourg. It is one of the Most Beautiful Villages of France, and it looks quite unlike its neighbours.

The difference is the building material: where Riquewihr and Obernai are timber-framed and painted, Mittelbergheim is stone — solid Renaissance houses in pale rendered masonry with tiled roofs, built by winegrowers who had money and wanted it to show.

The village

Two streets on a slope, and that is the whole village. What to look for:

• The dated lintels — house after house carries its year and the owner’s mark over the door, most of them sixteenth and seventeenth century
• The Hôtel de Ville of 1620, with an outside staircase and an oriel
• The Protestant church with its Romanesque tower — Mittelbergheim has had both confessions since the Reformation
• The oil mill — an eighteenth-century press, restored and demonstrated
• The courtyards — the wine presses are still in them, and in September you can hear them working

The wine

This is a serious wine village rather than a decorated one: around forty growers in 650 people, and the grand cru Zotzenberg above it.

Zotzenberg is unusual and worth knowing about. When the Alsace grand cru system was set up it admitted only four “noble” grapes — Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris and Muscat. Mittelbergheim’s growers argued that their best wine had always been Sylvaner, an everyday grape everywhere else, and that the marl-limestone of the Zotzenberg made something else of it. They won: in 2005 Zotzenberg became the only grand cru in Alsace permitted to produce Sylvaner.

Almost all of it is sold at the door. The village is exactly the place to taste something you cannot buy at home.

Getting to Mittelbergheim

• By car — on the wine route between Obernai and Dambach, 30 minutes from Strasbourg. Park at the edge and walk in.
• By train — Barr station is 2 km away, on the line from Strasbourg, which makes this one of the few wine villages reachable without a car. About 40 minutes, then a short walk.
• By bus — services along the wine route; check the return.

See parking in France.

Around Mittelbergheim

• Barr — 2 km, a larger wine town with its own grand cru and the Folie Marco museum
• Andlau — 3 km, with an abbey church whose carved Romanesque frieze is among the finest in Alsace
• Mont Sainte-Odile — the abbey on its cliff, 20 minutes
• Obernai — 8 km north
• Sélestat — 20 km south, with the Humanist Library

When to go

September and October for the harvest, when the presses are running in the courtyards and the village smells of it. May and June for the flowers. Mittelbergheim gets a fraction of the visitors of the famous villages and is worth an hour precisely for that.

See Alsace and the cooking of Alsace.

Photo credits

Photographs on this page come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, all by Ralph Hammann, CC BY-SA 4.0:

• Rue Principale
• Rue de la Montagne
• The town hall

Weather in Mittelbergheim

Updated: 24 September 2026