Wine and war
The first part of a two part look at Lebanon: a country with a fascinating history which makes some of my favourite wines.
It’s a Lebanese double bill this weekend as I’ll be looking at a great value summery wine from Chateau Ksara. Tasting the wine reminded me of something I wrote in 2018 for The Tonic Magazine on the country’s wines. The version that appeared in the magazine is a bit slicker but I rather like this slower, more thoughtful original. Obviously a lot has changed in Lebanon since I visited in 2016 as a guest of Wines of Lebanon but I think it stands up quite well. And keep your eyes peeling for Sunday Drinking…
When most wine makers die, they don’t get a feature in the Daily Mail but then Serge Hochar was exceptional in many ways. Not only did he make one of the world’s great wines in Château Musar but he made it in Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s when the country was torn apart by civil war. His stories of Syrian tanks interrupting the harvest inspired wine lovers throughout the world.
But Hochar wasn’t the only one making world class wines in impossible circumstances. Elie Maamari from another Lebanese producer, Château Ksara, also has hair-raising stories about the war years, he just doesn’t have Hochar’s flair for publicity. When I visited in 2016, Elie Maamari, now the firm’s export director, told me about the time he was arrested by Syrian forces for being a suspected Israeli collaborator; like many Lebanese he had a permit that allowed him to pass through Israeli checkpoints. He was going to be sent to prison in Damascus, which was often a death sentence, but someone influential at Ksara pulled some strings to get him released. Another time he was stopped at a roadblock by Druze militiamen who were looking for Maronite Christians to kill. Being Greek Orthodox, he was spared, but others weren’t so fortunate: “I remember hearing terrible sounds. I will never forget that”, he said.
As a first time visitor to the country, one has to do a bit of homework: what is a Maronite, or indeed a Druze? On my visit, Michael Karam, a Maronite himself and probably the world expert on Lebanese wine, tried to explain it to me. Though as he spoke I remembered the saying on Lebanese politics: ‘If you think you understand Lebanon, it is because someone has not explained it to you properly’. The Maronites and the Druze (an off shoot of Islam not recognised as Muslim by Shia or Sunni) are the people of Mount Lebanon and have been killing each other since long before the most recent civil war (1975-1990). Karam described his people as: “Stubborn, insular, rural, Francophone. Bitter as they once ran the show but no longer do.” The Druze are similar but “even more insular as they only represent about 5% of the population.” He compared the country to Scotland: “the stout and proud people of the mountains see themselves as the real deal, much like the Scottish Highlanders and the genteel Edinburgh folk.” These more genteel folk are the wealthy traders of the coast, usually Sunni or Greek Orthodox, who regard the mountain people as “a bit hick”, as Karam put it. Meanwhile at the bottom of the heap were the Shia who are now in the ascendant thanks to the wealthy diaspora and the influence of Iran. They are “no longer seen as the underclass",” according to Karam.
This complicated patchwork owes much to the French who created the modern Lebanese state in 1920 by putting together Mount Lebanon with coastal areas including Beirut, Sidon in the south, and the Bekaa valley (where most of the wine is made), which had been ruled from Damascus. As usual with European colonialists, the French played divide and rule by creating an elaborate political system where everyone would be represented but the Maronites would be in charge. The country still has this system though in revised form: the president is always a Christian, the prime minister Sunni and the speaker of the house Shia.
The French left in 1946. And the system worked, up to a point, when the Maronites were a majority, but the delicate balance was upset by the arrival of large numbers of, mainly Sunni, Palestinian refugees in the late 60s and early 70s. Today there is a fear that something similar might happen following the Syrian civil war but despite the massive influx of refugees, the country remains peaceful if not entirely stable.
France’s legacy is not all bad, however, they left a sophisticated wine industry in the Bekaa valley. There’s probably no wine made outside France that is more French. The Jesuits who founded Ksara in 1857 when the country was still under Ottoman rule brought grapes over from French Algeria, cinsault, carignan and grenache. The winery was sold to a consortium of local families in 1973 when the Pope decreed that the church wasn't allowed to own commercial enterprises. For foreigners, Lebanese wine might be Musar (founded in 1930) but for the Lebanese, it’s all about Ksara. It’s the wine you find in Lebanese restaurants around the world and its benchmark Reserve de Couvent red is served on Middle East Airlines.
As a demonstration of Ksara’s pedigree, Maamari and George Sara (the Sara family are also involved, they are Greek Catholic not Orthodox, just to confuse things further) opened some old wines over lunch. The standout was a bottle of 1960 Ksara Clos Saint Alphonse, a blend of the old Jesuit varieties that was rich, vigorous and delicious. If your old Châteauneuf-du-Pape tasted as good as this, you’d be delighted. And to finish they produced a sweet wine from 1936. 1936!
Wine has been made in Lebanon for thousands of years. The deep cellars beneath Ksara were first excavated by the Romans, but of pre-French varieties, there is very little sign. Unlike Turkey there aren’t a myriad of umlaut-laden grapes to twist your tongue around. Though people at Ixsir, a winery in the north of the country, are hunting for lost varieties and Karam thinks that more and more indigenous grapes will be discovered. There are, however, two interesting native white varieties, merwah and obeideh, which are usually used to make arak, the aniseed spirit loved by the Lebanese.
The French influence lingers on in other ways. Buying a pack of cigarettes in the Bekaa from an old Shia woman, we both switched to French, hers better than mine. Michael Karam joked that the French and the Lebanese got on well because they are both terrible snobs.
Beirut has some fine French restaurants but then Lebanon’s native food is spectacular: just don’t fill up on hummus and flatbread as I did the first night I was there. There will be many more courses, like kibbeh nayyeh, finely chopped raw lamb with onions, or baby aubergines stuffed with walnuts. Though the Lebanese tend to drink wine with French food, their own cuisine is better suited to palate-cleansing arak which you drink diluted. All the wineries make their own but Karam said that Arak Brun from Domaine des Tourelles is “considered by the Lebanese to be the gold standard”.
Faouzi Issa from the family that owns Tourelles told me how aniseed was hard to come by because the best comes from Hina, a village in Syria. There were sacks of it piled high everywhere like sandbags, insurance in case the war cuts off supply. In the Bekaa, Syria is very close. George Sara’s family have a factory there which makes mozzarella, so he spends a lot of time over the border. He shrugged and laughed when I asked him if it was dangerous.
Despite everyone’s fears, the conflict has not crossed over, but Lebanon is still more a collection of tribes than a nation. Drive around the country and it’s very clear when you’re in a Shia, Sunni or Christian area by the photos of politicians. All the militias disarmed in the 1990s except the Shia militia, Hezbollah, who run a state within a state. One Lebanese Christian confided in me that it would have been good for his country if Israel had been successful in destroying Hezbollah during the 2006 invasion. They weren’t and Hezbollah emerged stronger than ever. The country is caught between its powerful neighbours with the Shia leaning to Iran, the Sunni to Saudi Arabia and the Christians not sure where to go. In 2017, the Sunni prime minister Saad Hariri was kidnapped by the Saudis in an incident that still hasn’t been fully explained. At least he survived, unlike his father Rafic Hariri, who also served as prime minister, assassinated by the Syrians in 2005.
Nevertheless, spend some time in Beirut, and you can’t help noticing that there’s a lot of money knocking about. Following the end of the civil war in 1990, there was something of a wine gold rush. One of the investors in Château Kefraya (a winery down the road from Ksara) was none other than Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze militia who very nearly killed Maamari. “The Lebanese have a habit of forgetting”, as Edouard Kosremelli director at Kefraya so beautifully put it. In the 90s and 00s, the wine industry looked to Bordeaux for inspiration and planted cabernet and merlot. The old Jesuit grape varieties were considered, well, a bit common and only went into the everyday wines (which are excellent, the cheapest wine in a Lebanese restaurant is always a good bet).
Today, however, the Lebanese wine industry is waking up to its unique heritage. Wineries are beginning to appreciate the old Jesuit varieties. In 2016 Domaine des Tourelles released a spicy heady wine made entirely from cinsault which for me is Lebanon in a glass, an exotic commingling of the Levant with southern France. Then in 2018 Ksara released the first varietal merwah, a white wine made from a grape found nowhere else in the world, most daring of all, the most prominent language on the label was Arabic, not French. Mon dieu!
Musar have done some interesting ‘diffusion’ lines — Levantine is very good, sold through M&S around £19, which became our ‘house’ wine until supplies ran out…
A fine piece, richly detailed. I didn't know about Elie's experience. As you undoubtedly know, many other Lebanese winemakers also suffered during the civil war and the Israeli invasions - 1978 - and the far more significant one, in 1982. In the latter case, an Israeli tank company parked itself at Chateau Kefraya and arrested its long-haired French winemaker on suspicion that he might be a member of the radical international left, whatever that might have meant (Michael Karam explains that well in is Wines of Lebanon). A couple of corrections, though. The Maronites were not a majority at independence. At best, they were a plurality; the last census, conducted in 1932 by the not-disinterested French, said they were the largest single community in the country, and that Christians - Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics (Melkites), and others - composed a thin minority of the country. By the time independence was declared in 1943, and positions were allocated across communities, it is unclear that this majority in fact remained intact. It was certainly close, but not clear. Nonetheless, as you note, the presidency - then the most powerful official position, was designated for Maronites, the prime ministery, for Sunnis, office of parliament speaker to Shiites, etc. While the arrival of majority Sunni Palestinian refugees in 1948 was potentially disruptive to the country's demographic balance, it's important to remember that 1) the balance was already a fiction 2) a large percentage of these refugees were Greek Orthodox who were given a far easier path to naturalizing as Lebanese citizens than the Sunnis were. In any case, it's important to note that Christians in the country have rarely been united as a force, not even in opposition to Muslims, who, as you also note, are themselves divided. And, even within the Maronite community, there were important divisions. All to say, the conflict cannot be reduced to Christians versus Muslims. While the quip you cite from the Lebanese "Christian" saying it would have been better if Israel defeated Hizbullah in 2006 is a sentiment held by some, even Sunnis, it wasn't generally shared by most Lebanese of all confessions. In fact, following Hizbullah's victory in 2006, there was tremendous elation across Lebanon's multiple communities for Hizbullah's resistance (hard-core partisan opponents of Hizbullah, notwithstanding). Inevitably, the country's deteriorating situation has been ascribed, in part to grotesque corruption in the country in which Hizbullah leaders, at minimum tolerate (and certainly benefit from) that reached a crescendo with the port explosion in August 2020, has amplified anti-Hizbullah sentiment, but again, it isn't a Christian/Muslim thing. People of all communities are simply fed up and with no resolution in sight, the idea of an external power taking out the corrupt leaders (be it the US, France, Israel) might seem, rhetorically, at least, appealing. Anyway, a fine piece. I look forward to the next.