“You’re getting the same quality as wines that are double the price,” says Matt Wilkin MS, of H2Vin, which imports Château Marsyas and Domaine Bargylus into the UK. “When you think what it costs to make them and the circumstances in which they are made, these wines really offer a fantastic price to quality ratio.”
In the northern district of Batroun, another mini revival is taking place. Where 20 years ago there was nothing, there are now 10, mainly micro, wineries with cooler sea-facing vineyards. The Batroun producer with the most ambition is arguably Ixsir, an award-winning ‘green’ winery whose philosophy is to work with the best Lebanese terroir, not just in Batroun in the north, but across the country from Jezzine in the south. Working at altitude is key to the winery’s identity, planting vines as high as 1,800m – among the very highest in the northern hemisphere.
DIVERSITY ASSURED
While the Bekaa Valley is still the epicentre of Lebanese winemaking, there is the notion that it was an anomaly, an enclave in an otherwise ‘dry’ Arab country. Ixsir and the rest of the Batroun producers want to champion the district as Lebanon’s second wine region and, with other wineries in the south – Mount Lebanon and the Chouf – further diversity is assured.
In neighbouring Syria it’s a slightly different story. At Domaine Bargylus, founded in 2005 by Syrian-Lebanese brothers Sandro and Karim Saade, on the sea-facing slopes of Jabal Ansarieh above the port city of Latakia, making wine goes hand in hand with staying alive. In the same year, the brothers also established Château Marsyas in the Bekaa Valley. Of the two, it was considered the riskiest venture. No one could have predicted what would happen in Syria.
They retained the services of leading French consultant Stéphane Derenoncourt for both projects. He admits it is frustrating to make wine in Syria by remote control but he has no choice. “I look at photographs, send emails and receive grape samples by taxi. This is not how it is supposed to be done,” he told me in Beirut last year. “But this is our baby. We started from scratch and now we are working with exciting terroir that will one day be famous all over the world. I know these wines can age and I want to be able to taste the war vintage in 15 years.”
The Saades do indeed go to extraordinary lengths to get their wines from Syria to Europe. Before the war, the wines made the simple overland journey to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, but now they have to make an astonishingly complicated journey via the port of Latakia in northern Syria to Port Said in Egypt and then back to Beirut, before being shipped on to Belgium.
Winemaking in the Middle East has had to cope with war, occupation or instability for millennia. It’s part of the business model. “As long as it is humanly possible we will harvest our grapes and make wine to standards we have become known for,” says Karim Saade. “We will show the world that Syria and Lebanon are not just areas of conflict. We have a message of civilisation and generosity of spirit that we can share.”
