Munster Valley

The smell arrives before the valley does. Driving west from Colmar on the D417, the landscape narrows and rises and the air changes — from the flat wine-country warmth of the Rhine plain to something cooler, damper, more alpine — and somewhere in that transition the distinctive smell of Munster cheese begins. It is a smell that rewards bravery: rich, barnyard-edged, slightly funky, and completely specific to this valley and the cows that have grazed it for centuries. By the time you reach the town of Munster itself, thirty kilometers into the Vosges, you have accepted it completely and it starts to seem like a reasonable way for air to smell.

The valley is the other Alsace — the one that doesn’t appear on the wine route brochures. The villages here are stone rather than half-timbered, the farms still active, the landscape more suited to hiking than to tarte flambée photography. The Route des Crêtes runs along the ridge above the valley, the old World War One military road built to supply the front that stabilized here in 1914 and barely moved until 1918. The views from the ridge — east over the patchwork of Alsace toward Germany, west over the rolling Lorraine plateau — are among the most expansive in the region.

The cheese itself, if you have only encountered it in supermarket versions, deserves to be reacquainted with under its proper conditions. The fermiers who make it here — several families in the valley around Munster and Gunsbach — produce something categorically different from the washed-rind wheels sold in vacuum packaging across France. The good stuff is sold from the farms directly, sometimes from open-air stalls on the roadside, the wheel runny at the edges and smelling powerfully of its origins. Eat it with Alsatian Gewurztraminer, which is the one wine with enough aromatic presence to hold its own alongside the cheese. It is one of the great food pairings in French regional cooking, and it exists here and almost nowhere else in its proper form.

The hiking from Munster is excellent and underused. The GR5 long-distance path passes through the valley, and the trail to the Lac du Forlet and the Lac Blanc in the upper reaches involves a half-day walk through forest and open boggy plateau that feels less like Alsace than like the Scottish Highlands. In October the colors — beeches orange and ferns rust-red against grey sandstone — are spectacular in a way that doesn’t require wine culture or medieval architecture to appreciate.

The town of Munster itself is modest. It was heavily bombed in 1944 and rebuilt without great architectural distinction, but the Friday market is one of the best in Alsace for cheese, smoked meats, and local honey, and the auberges serving Munster fondue — a dish so cheese-forward it requires an afternoon commitment — are worth seeking out. Order the fondue, drink the Gewurztraminer, and walk back up the valley until the smell of the pastures overtakes the smell of the cheese, which takes longer than you’d expect.

When to go: September and October for the best hiking light and the freshest new-season cheese from the mountain farms. July and August for the pastures at their greenest, with cows still on the high summer grazings. The Route des Crêtes can cloud in heavily in spring — check conditions before heading up.