Drive Time in Alsace

The golf courses in this picturesque region of eastern France proved an exciting challenge for Adam Ruck, and he still made time to sample the area’s famous wines.

“This is my favourite time to play,” said Jean, as the sun threw long shadows across the fairway at Kempferhof on the first afternoon of November. “Aren’t the colours fantastic?”

Le Kempf, as he calls it, is my friend’s home course near Strasbourg, tucked away in a woodland park threaded by waterways distantly connected to the River Rhine.

I was looking for my ball at the time, swishing at a carpet of leaves with an increasingly angry wedge, so I didn’t feel quite so sympathetic towards golf in the autumn. But there was no denying that the carpet was a pretty colour.

I got to know Jean a quarter of a century ago in Val-d’Isère, the most alsacien of Alpine ski resorts, where he and his brother ran a ski school and served riesling in plastic cups to friends and clients every evening at apéro time.

When Jean changed direction to run a hotel in his native Strasbourg on the border with Germany and work on his handicap at le Kempf, I followed him there and fell under the spell of a course which combines the charm of a secret garden with the challenge of an 18-piece puzzle bracelet. Every hole asks an awkward question, or several.

After ditching balls in the water for the last time, we shook hands and made for the bar. It was a moment for honesty. Playing at le Kempf is always a treat but this course, often rated in the top half dozen in France, deserves to be looked after, but, during my round, signs of neglect could not be ignored. Greens were patchy, tee boxes a little ragged and some bunkers churned up. Did golfers consider the rake unworthy of their attention?