Photo : Bernard Chenal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mittelbergheim
Mittelbergheim is a wine village in the Bas-Rhin, between Sélestat and Strasbourg on the Alsace wine route, at an altitude of between 187 and 340 metres. It has about 600 inhabitants and is among the Most Beautiful Villages of France. Its territory has been inhabited since Roman times; the noble Berckheim family established its main residence there in the thirteenth century.
The village preserves about a hundred Renaissance stone houses, about 80 of them built between 1540 and 1630, which gives it great architectural unity. You can see the town hall of 1620, a medieval wine press and an old eighteenth-century oil mill. Two churches stand side by side: the Catholic church of Saint-Étienne, built in 1893, and the Protestant church, of Romanesque origin. Having turned to the Reformation in 1545, the village shared its church between the two faiths until 1894.
More than half of the communal territory is occupied by vines, which produce Alsace AOC wines, including the grand cru Zotzenberg. The poet Czesław Miłosz, future Nobel Prize winner for literature, stayed there in 1951. The village is visited on foot, along lanes that climb between the vines.
