The ‘best bottles’ are those (often modest, though delicious) that mean most to you. Here’s an example ... of what I mean about meaning.
Back in the early 1990s, I won a travel bursary. I’d read about Serge Hochar; I’d enjoyed drinking Ch Musar; the chaotic 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War had recently subsided. I made a few arrangements, queued lengthily for a visa, and bought an Austrian Airlines ticket to Beirut.
What do I remember of that trip? I remember the Syrians controlling the airport, and the photographs of Hafez al-Assad pinned to the walls. Being driven by Tarek Sakr, then a new young Musar recruit, though a Beirut without traffic lights, without road markings, without any traffic conventions at all other than improbable daring and use of the horn – and Tarek talking ceaselessly about Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham as we pitched, swerved, and lurched through potholes. Walking through ruined parts of the city and being told to stay away from the edge of the road, since unexploded ordnance nestled, scorpion-like, in the rubble … and of course talking at length with Serge, hearing his stories, and discovering the intricate Levantine architecture of his mind.
Terror, catastrophe, serenity and acceptance coexisted there, mosaic-like, in a way that I found hard to understand. There was a housing development the family had been involved with: bombed to rubble. “We will start again.” With what? Both hands raised. “God is full of funds.” Are you still afraid? “I’m not about to die. Not yet. I will die in eleven years.” (He lived for another 21.) Are you relieved that the long war is finally over, that you can get back to work as normal again? “Yes, but it will all happen again. It will happen again, many times.”
I was last in Lebanon, on a trip organised by the indefatigable Michael Karam, in November 2016, after Isis and the garbage crisis: a brief moment of optimism, despite the colossal refugee burden that Lebanon was bearing as the murderous Syrian Civil War unfolded next door. Then came financial meltdown in 2019; Covid, here as elsewhere but more dangerously; and the barely believable port explosion of August 2020, one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions ever recorded.
Now the fabric of the Lebanese state is shaken again by the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah: smouldering embers raked into life by the Hamas October 7th 2023 incursion into Southern Israel and by the subsequent horrors of Israel’s Gaza campaign; then doused with petrol by Israel’s 2025 attacks on Iran, and now by the 2026 Israeli and American attack on Iran. Southern Lebanon is again a demolition site, under Israeli occupation, with 40,000 homes in rubble; more than 3,000 Lebanese lives have been lost so far this year, many children among them, and over a million Lebanese displaced; Beirut and the Bekaa have been bombed. Four out of five Lebanese now live, unnecessarily and through no fault of their own, in poverty.
And Lebanon’s wine makers work on. I don’t know how; but they do.
In early April 2026, shocked, I wrote to some of those winemakers I had visited almost ten years earlier, not as a journalist but as a human being who felt impelled to imagine a little of what they were undergoing.
They told me that domestic sales are at a standstill, and Middle Eastern sales are all cancelled or postponed. Commercial shipping has slowed; containers can wait on the dockside for a month. Pruning was finished in March as drones and Israeli war planes flew overhead. Many of those in the winemaking community have family members from Southern Lebanon who they are trying to shelter and help. “We keep going,” said Joe Touma of Ch St Thomas, “not because it is easy, but because this land and the vines are a part of who we are. And because each wine we produce carries a message of resilience and continuity.”
Later in April 2026, I had a chance to spend an afternoon with my eldest son in Paris, where he’s been studying for the last three years. We talked of these events, as we always do; he wants to work as a journalist, to report events at first hand to those willing to listen, and to defend truth-telling from the onslaught of falsehoods from dictators and would-be dictators, facilitated and amplified by social media and religious imposture. We had dinner at a small Lebanese restaurant near the Gare du Lyon, and we drank together a bottle of Ch Kefraya’s 2022 Bretèches red. It’s not an expensive wine (32€ on the bill) and I took no notes. But it was lovely, and we both loved it: gentle, textured, resonant, appetising. A blend – but nonetheless testament to the easy grandeur Cinsault can attain in the Bekaa.
It was just a wine, just a modest bottle of wine -- but wines stand for things. We didn’t just drink; we felt.