At Baalbek, at the northern end of the Bekaa, the Romans built one of the largest temple complexes of their empire, and its best preserved building is the Temple of Bacchus, carved with vines and grapes. Wine here is older still: the Phoenicians shipped it from the Lebanese coast across the Mediterranean, and at Tell el-Burak south of Sidon a wine press from the 7th century BC was excavated and presented in 2020. The Bekaa is a high plateau rather than a valley, about 120 kilometres long and 16 wide, between Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, its floor at 900 to 1,100 metres.
Sun, snow and a thousand metres
The mechanism is altitude. Mount Lebanon takes the rain from the sea, so the valley has long dry summers, around 300 days of sunshine and cold nights; the winters bring rain and snow that feed the springs and the Litani. The valley floor lies about as high as the upper vineyards of Visperterminen in Valais, which at about 1,150 metres are among Europe’s highest; here that is the ordinary level. Grapes ripen fully yet keep their acidity, and the French grapes have thrived: Cinsault, which the Jesuits brought in the 19th century, Carignan and Grenache, then Cabernet Sauvignon from Bordeaux and, more widely since the 1990s, Merlot and the Rhône’s Syrah. Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc stand beside the native whites Obeidi and Merwah, long used mostly for arak and now increasingly made into wine.
In the glass
The grapes the region is known for, by sweetness, acidity, tannin and body.
| Grape | Sweetness | Acidity | Tannin | Body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cabernet Sauvignon | dry | medium to high | medium(+) to high | medium to full |
| Syrah | dry | medium to medium(+) | medium to high | medium to full |
| Grenache | dry, also sweet | low to medium | low to medium | medium to full |
| Merlot | dry | medium(−) to medium | medium(−) to medium(+) | medium to full |
| Chardonnay | dry | medium to high | white, no tannin | medium(−) to full |
| Sauvignon Blanc | dry | medium(+) to high | white, no tannin | medium(−) to medium |
Each grape’s typical range worldwide, not in this region alone, on the WSET tasting grid (Level 3, 2022): dry to luscious, low to high, light to full. The dot before each name shows the colour of a typical bottle. Outlined: a sweet style beside the dry wines.
Jesuits, a fox and a war
Modern Lebanese wine begins with the Jesuits. In 1857 they founded Château Ksara near Zahlé and planted vines; in 1898, as the house tells it, a fox hunt led them to a Roman-era grotto whose two kilometres of caves are now Ksara’s cellars. Ksara is still the country’s oldest and largest winery, with about 3 million bottles a year. In 1930 Gaston Hochar founded Château Musar, with cellars at Ghazir north of Beirut and vines in the Bekaa at about 1,000 metres. His son Serge made wine through the civil war of 1975 to 1990 and lost only the 1976 vintage; the 1967 Musar was the discovery of the Bristol Wine Fair in 1979. The red Musar, mainly Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault and Carignan, ages for decades.
Sense of scale
2,500 ha Bekaa Valley has about 17 % of the Swiss vineyard.
One square is all of Switzerland: about 14,350 hectares of vines.
From five wineries to fifty
Château Kefraya planted its vines at the foot of Mount Barouk in 1951 and made its first wine in 1979, in mid-war; Massaya was founded in 1998 by the Ghosn brothers with the Bruniers of Vieux Télégraphe; Domaine Wardy and IXSIR belong to the new wave. From five producers in the mid-1990s Lebanon has grown to around fifty. Over nine tenths of its wine grapes grow in the Bekaa; the country makes about 8 to 9 million bottles a year and exports a third, to Britain, France, the United States and wherever the diaspora lives, which is thought to outnumber the Lebanese at home.
At the table the wine belongs with mezze: hummus, tabbouleh, kibbeh, grilled lamb. Arak, the aniseed grape spirit, turns milky with water and ice and opens the meal; the reds go with the lamb at 16 to 18 degrees, an old Musar decanted an hour ahead; an Obeidi white suits the fish at 8 to 10 degrees.