Christmas Markets on
the Rhine - Wine Cruise

Yes, it’s generally recognised as the oldest documented Christmas market in France, with records tracing it back to 1570, and it’s often cited among the oldest in Europe too. It grew out of an earlier Saint Nicholas market that was banned during the Reformation for venerating saints, and it settled into its current main location on Place Broglie in 1871, though the market has since spread across a dozen or so squares throughout the city.

Since 1996, the town’s Baroque-era town hall has had all 24 of its windows turned into a giant advent calendar, one revealed each evening from late November through Christmas Eve, with a different artist commissioned to design the artwork each year. Past contributors have included Marc Chagall and Andy Warhol. It’s widely credited as the largest advent calendar in the world, and the nightly unveiling draws a crowd that gathers below to watch each window’s curtain go up at 6pm.

Both are local specialities from cities just 25 miles apart, and there’s a long-standing rivalry between them. Kölsch is pale, light and served in small, narrow glasses in Cologne, while Altbier is darker and maltier, closer to a traditional ale, and Düsseldorf drinkers tend to be just as loyal to it as Cologne is to Kölsch. Ordering the wrong one in either city is unlikely to cause real offence, but it’s a good conversation starter with any local bartender.

It’s built around Asbach brandy, a German brandy specific to the Rüdesheim area, warmed and ignited before being mixed with coffee and topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. The drink is usually prepared tableside using a special two-handled cup, developed in the 1950s specifically to serve it, and the small performance of lighting the brandy is very much part of the tradition rather than just theatre for tourists.

It’s a 13th-century castle built by the Archbishop of Mainz to guard a nearby silver mine, perched where the Lahn river meets the Rhine. Local legend ties it to the Knights Templar, said to have made a last stand there in 1312, though historians treat that story as folklore rather than fact, and the writer Goethe was inspired to write a poem about the castle after seeing it on his own travels down the Rhine.