Colmar

The colours are improbable. Pink, pale blue, mint green, butter yellow — half-timbered façades painted in washed-out pastels and doubled in canals so still that the reflections hold every window box. Colmar is French Alsace distilled into a single old town, the timber frames leaning at angles that predate the idea of a plumb line, and on Friday and Saturday nights the whole of it is lit.

Colmar sits among the vineyards of the Alsace wine route in the Rhine plain, with the Vosges behind it, and calls itself the capital of Alsace wines with reason — the winemakers' houses in the old town pour Riesling, Gewurztraminer and Crémant a couple of streets from the canals. La Petite Venise, the old district of fishermen and tanners along the water, is best seen from a flat-bottomed boat, and the pedestrianised centre — a listed protected sector — takes you from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century in a few streets of carved timber. The Unterlinden Museum holds Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, among the most powerful paintings in northern art, and Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, was born here; his house is a museum. In December the Christmas markets fill the squares, and the winstubs serve sauerkraut, tarte flambée, Munster and kugelhopf all year.