“A young wine can talk to you for maybe only a second or a minute, but a wine that has aged, a wine with experience — well, that can talk to you for hours,” says Serge Hochar.

Hochar, a twinkly eyed septuagenarian, is the grand old man of Lebanese wine. He has run the family business, Château Musar, since 1959 and has made it his life’s work to get his country’s wine onto the international map. Droughts in the country’s main wine-producing area of the Bekaa Valley have not stopped him in this quest — and neither did a bloody civil war throughout the 1970s and 80s that claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.

Hochar has seen it all, and when you ask him about the difficulty of bringing in a harvest when your vineyards are in the middle of a war zone, he does what many of his countrymen do. He shrugs his shoulders, saying: “This is Lebanon. We just get on with it.”

We are standing in the Musar cellars at the winery in Ghazir, which is up in the mountains above Jounieh, about 15 miles north of Beirut. Old Serge has a trick for journalists prepared to make the trip up the mountain. He asks you when you were born and will pluck a bottle from the racks made in the year of your birth. On first taste the 1977 red, made from Cabernet Sauvignon (“the skeleton”), Carignan (“the muscles”) and Cinsault (“the skin”) grapes, is vinegary and sharp. He watches my contorted face with amusement.

“If you were given that in a restaurant, you would send it back, am I right?” he says with a knowing smile. “But leave it for a few minutes and then taste it again.” After 10 minutes its smell and taste had changed completely into something light and fresh that lingered deliciously on the tongue. The wine was certainly talking to me as I witnessed, first-hand, the fabled magic of Musar.

Back in Beirut I was amused to read the tasting notes of Derek Smedley, a well-known Master of Wine, who gave the ’77 Musar a score of 97 out of 100, one of the highest marks he has given any wine. If Château Musar is one of the oldest and best-known wineries in Lebanon, dozens of young pretenders are striving to get the same recognition. At the turn of the century there were just four or five wineries in the country but the last decade has seen an explosion of another 40 or so start up, the reason being it has become a sort of status symbol. If you make money in Lebanon, you buy a black 4×4, a place in the mountains where you can ski in the winter, you go to the most exclusive beach clubs in summer, and hire a Filipino maid or two. If you become colossally rich, you buy or found a bank. But increasingly, mega-wealthy Lebanese people are setting up or acquiring wineries.

The latest to throw his money into such a venture is Renault–Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, who is of Lebanese descent, and is now a silent partner in IXSIR, a contemporary winery in Batroun that puts the environment at its core. Its wine even inspired renowned French wine critic Jean-Marc Quarin to award it “the best grade I have ever given to a Lebanese wine” at Bordeaux’s infamous La Semaine des Primeurs.

Others that have made a real splash in the last five years are Massaya, Domaine Wardy, Château Marsyas, Château Ka and the revamped Domaine des Tourelles, which has been around since the 1860s but is now under new management. The last two named, along with the country’s only real industrial wine producer, Château Ksara, became the first Lebanese wines to be sold by Marks & Spencer last year. The boutique winery Château Belle-Vue, on top of Mount Lebanon in Bhamdoun, is another making waves, run as it is by a thoroughly effervescent and likeable investment banker called Naji Boutros.

Yet despite the fact wine has been produced in Lebanon for several thousand years, it is not the drink of choice for most of its countrymen. About 65 per cent of Lebanon’s population are Muslims and many of them do not drink, so it’s fair to say making and drinking wine is chiefly, although not exclusively, the preserve of the country’s Maronite Christians. Chances are, if someone does drink, they will plump for arak, a delicious digestif made from aniseed. Like its brothers pastis, raki and ouzo, it is a clear liquid that turns milky when water is added. It is a natural accompaniment to Lebanon’s beautiful, Eastern Mediterranean fare: the unavoidable mezze, hummus, kibbeh, fattoush and tabbouleh salads.

The Lebanese love to party and Beirut is host to some of the biggest nightclubs in the world. The flashier love to spend a fortune at places such as Sky Bar or White, thinking nothing of splurging $600 on a bottle of whisky or vodka, their preferred tipples. Drinks distributors go to great lengths to make sure their brand is the only one available, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for exclusivity. Experts say Beirut is one of the most expensive cities in the world to sustain and keep a brand, with one bar owner giving the example of a distributor offering him $60,000 to $70,000 worth of free alcohol if $250,000 was purchased — on condition of being the sole distributor.

“You might think Islam and vineyards make uneasy bedfellows, but they coexist peacefully in the Bekaa, with winemaking accepted as part of the culture of the land.”

I talk to Naji Hmouda who knows more about the drinks industry in Lebanon than almost anyone. As marketing guru at Khalil Fattal et Fils (KFF), one of Lebanon’s biggest distributors of drinks brands since it launched in 1926, he is quick to put me right on Arab drinking habits, telling me spirits take 46 per cent of the alcoholic beverage market and wine 33 per cent, while beer, although growing, stands at a mere
21 per cent.

Although his company represents some of the drinks industry’s most famous names, including Dewar’s Scotch whisky, Bacardi rum, Bombay Sapphire gin and Grey Goose vodka, it is the Lebanese wine brand he represents, Château Kefraya, for which he holds a special regard. His company has even taken a stake in the winery. “We do everything for Kefraya except produce the wine — the marketing, the advertising, promotions, distribution,” he says. He regards the brand as one of the most exciting to work with. “It really is the most beautiful wine. Our strategy for the winery is based on artistry. There is art in everything they do in the Bekaa,” he says, and he is not the only one to wax lyrical about his country’s renewed interest in the grape.

“In Lebanon the wine is produced to complement our food,” says Ramzi Ghosn, co-owner of the upwardly mobile Massaya winery. “Ask yourself where the Romans built the Temple of Bacchus, the god of wine. It’s not in Tuscany, it’s not in Rioja, it’s not in Bordeaux. It’s in Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, just half an hour from here.”

It is to this world-famous temple that I head next. As I drive along the valley floor, the calls to prayer from numerous mosques drift across the vineyards, and as I approach Baalbek, billboards of Shia clerics and martyrs begin to line the road. Baalbek is the headquarters of Hezbollah, the Islamic political party whose military wing is regarded as a terrorist organisation by many countries, including Britain. You might think Islam and vineyards make uneasy bedfellows, but they coexist peacefully in the Bekaa, with winemaking accepted as part of the culture of the land.

It is this ancient terroir that will see off today’s political radicals in the same way it did the Phoenicians, the Romans and everybody else who has occupied it momentarily since.

---

---