The suitcase full of booze that put Lebanese wine on the map

Victoria Moore

March 22, 2023 at 1:00 PM·4 min read

‘They gave us a huge, huge opportunity. When we go to any country to talk about Lebanon, they know us.’ Winemaker Faouzi Issa of Domaine des Tourelles is quick to acknowledge the achievement of the legendary late Serge Hochar of Château Musar, who famously set out from a war-torn Lebanon in 1979 and headed to London with a suitcase full of wine, the beginning of a decades-long sales pitch that traversed the continents and put Lebanon on the wine map. Nine years after Hochar’s death, Musar, a family winery, lives on, but there is also a thriving Lebanese wine scene beyond it.

Lebanon emerged from the civil war in 1990 with just a handful of wineries: Musar, Château Ksara, Château Kefraya, Château Nakad and Domaine des Tourelles. Today there are about 60. Among them is the boutique Château Belle-Vue, founded by investment banker Naji Boutros, who returned to his native Lebanon after an epiphany in Milan Cathedral and began making wines that are now hard to get hold of and sell for more than £50 a bottle.

IXSIR, another, was established in 2008 near the sea in Batroun, northern Lebanon, with Hubert de Boüard of Château Angélus (in St Emilion) as a consultant; and Domaine Wardy was set up in the late 1990s.

Lebanon makes about 11 million bottles of wine a year, putting it in the same ballpark as the English wine industry. ‘We’re old, we’re small, we’re traders and we’re high. Our trump card is our altitude,’ as Lebanese wine expert Michael Karam likes to say. ‘The highest vines are 2,400 metres, probably the highest in the northern hemisphere, and competing with the Argentinians.’ Altitude, of course, brings cooler temperatures, which means fresher-tasting wines.

Some of Lebanon’s wines have a distinctly international flavour. There’s also a desire to ‘show the world something different’, as Issa puts it. He trained in France, in the Rhône (under the revered René Rostaing) and Bordeaux (at the hallowed Château Margaux), but returned to Lebanon at the age of 26 determined not to make copies of any of the greats, but to use his technical expertise to make the best Lebanese wines he could.

Issa now works with what he calls ‘my style of Mediterranean varieties’, making reds that celebrate carignan and cinsault and reining back (for the most part) on oak. Meanwhile, a resurgence of interest in old varieties by the likes of Domaine Wardy as well as Domaine des Tourelles means it’s now possible to buy whites made from obeidi and merweh.

Don’t think you’ll check all of these out at your local Lebanese restaurant, though. While Issa says sales of his wines are ‘sommelier-led, especially in places like New York’, there’s a recognition that to succeed, Lebanon needs to be seen to have wines that can be of interest beyond that narrow groove. For example, it says a lot that Belle-Vue’s importer in the UK is the fine-wine-oriented Oene Group.

Wines to try from what Issa calls this ‘beautiful, sweet and sour country’? Château Ksara Réserve du Couvent 2019 (13.5%; The Wine Society, £11.95) is a cabernet sauvignon-shiraz blend; Specially Selected Lebanese Red 2020 (13.5%; Aldi, £8.99) is characterful; Domaine des Tourelles Vieilles Vignes Carignan 2019 (14%; darcywine.co.uk, £17.75) is saturated in flavour with a fresh finish.