Wine - Roger Scruton falls for Lebanese wine
Published 13 March 2006
Where madness and charm coexist, as in Lebanon, wine is never far away
We all know Chateau Musar, championed by the late Auberon Waugh as one of the great wines of the world, and sold from the London offices of Serge and Ronald Hochar to a loyal clientele of Bronists. But Musar comes from only one among a dozen established wineries in a country whose name ought to be more often on the lips of wine-lovers, since it was in Lebanon, they say, that it all began. Archaeologists dispute this: maybe it was a little further to the north, in the as yet uninundated Black Sea basin. Maybe it was a little further east, in the Fertile Crescent, or a little further south in the hills of Palestine. But maybe it was as the Lebanese claim - that their Phoenician forebears were first to make wine, as they were certainly first to establish a wine-growing and wine-trading economy, exporting the famous "wine of Byblos" all over the Mediterranean, and helping the Egyptians to step down from their flat frescoes and dance for a while in 3D.
For all that, Lebanon has been off the wine-lover's map for two millennia. Musar apart, its wines are hardly exported, and inside the country a mere three million bottles are drunk each year. The publication of a sumptuous book by Michael Karam, Wines of Lebanon (Saqi Books), is a first step towards rectifying this. The photographs are by Norbert Schiller, who is an acute observer, showing the details that reveal the genius loci: a pale-faced, busty girl in revealing T-shirt working side by side with a Bedouin whose face is hidden by a tightly wrapped
keffiyeh; elegant gentlemen in suits and ties recalling Humphrey
Bogart in Casablanca, alongside wiry old peasants in woolly cardigans and absurd bowler hats - the madness and charm of Lebanon are both succinctly captured in images which show that, where madness and charm coexist, wine is never far away.
The first commercial winery in modern Lebanon was that of Chateau Ksara, founded by Jesuit monks in 1857 near the Christian town of Zahle in the Beqa'a, and still Lebanon's biggest and most popular producer. Between the Phoenicians and 1857 wine was certainly produced in Lebanon, as Christian communities had the right under the Ottoman millet system to produce sweet wine for communion, and all communities, Christian, Druze, Sunni and Shia, were in the habit of fermenting grapes for the production of arrack. The chateau was sold in 1972 when the Vatican ordered its foundations to sell off any profitable enterprises, profit being at the time as politically incorrect as plainsong. After years of rough management compounded by civil war and multiple invasions, Chateau Ksara has now regained its reputation. The red and rose, made from Rhone varietals such as Carignan and Cinsault, will justify a visit to any Lebanese restaurant that serves them.
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