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We climb Mount Lebanon, which rises rapidly from the Mediterranean. Navigating the narrow, rutted roads, we cut through a landscape littered with lush ravines and barren quarries; rivers dyed red with topsoil runoff, which the ancients believed to be the blood of Adonis; olive trees, firs, and cedars; and red-roofed homes that dot once-picturesque villages now covered by concrete. After making a hairpin turn at the top, we arrive—abruptly—in the Bekaa Valley, a sun-soaked, patchy plain that the Romans called the “breadbasket of the world.”
We’re almost there: Dayr al-Ahmar, a village huddled beneath the northern peaks.
[...]Farmers here used to grow cannabis and opium poppies destined for the hash and heroin trade. Now, they grow grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Tempranillo, and more. Working together in the Cooperative Coteaux d’Heliopolis—or the “Heliopolis Cooperative,” inspired by the Hellenic name for Baalbek, a major nearby town—farmers in the area have been supplying grapes to Lebanon’s largest wineries since the early 2000s.
The farmers make wine, too. With the help of winemakers, the co-op has created two new labels: Coteaux Les Cedres and Day‘aa, an Arabic-labeled wine that derives its name, and incorporates the imagery of, a Lebanese village. A few of the farmers are launching their own private winery, Couvent Rouge, through which they hope to further help other farmers—and, of course, turn a profit.
People have been growing grapes and making wine in the Bekaa Valley for millennia. “There was an uninterrupted wine culture in Lebanon even before the Jesuits [revitalized winemaking] in 1857,” says Michael Karam, the Lebanese-British author of Lebanese Wines. The Jesuits’ “game changer was that they made a dry wine” and “laid the foundations of the modern wine industry. Then, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the French, things really began to motor,” he adds.
But long before the Jesuits, the Phoenicians, a seafaring people who lived on the Levantine coast in ancient times, made and traded wine all around the Mediterranean. Locals kept making wine under the Hellenic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, and Byzantine rulers that passed through Lebanon during the next couple thousand years.
And they did so under the Muslim—Arab, Persian, Egyptian, Turkic, and Turkish—rulers that governed the area, with a few Crusader interludes, from the fall of Rome until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Christians made wine for sacrament and private consumption, which is why viticulture survived—though it did atrophy—under the Ottomans, who tried to ban the making and consumption of wine except for religious purposes. Monks flourished as winemakers. Monasteries throughout the Middle East became halls of hospitality, and then hedonism, for Muslim travelers and visitors. And, anyway, Muslims were not as uniformly opposed to wine—or its effects—as contemporary stereotypes and simplifications suggest.
[...]We see Couvent Rouge in the distance: a concrete bunker, angular but still elegant, perched on a hill like a Galactic Empire command center in the Levant.[...]Sauntering through rows of Syrah and Tempranillo, Melhem explains how the Heliopolis Cooperative serves as a useful intermediary for farmers. “When we started out, we didn’t know much about grapes. It took about four years. We made mistakes. All the while, the government did nothing for us! I think some of the ministers worry about alcohol. Haram, eh? No, they prefer guns…”
The co-op stepped in. It simplified issues relating to land titles, eased the banks’ credit-risk concerns, secured more favorable loans, and backstopped farmers financially—thereby making the transition from the drug trade, which still dwarfs winemaking in terms of revenue, much more attractive than it otherwise would have been. The farmers then focused on “when to trim, what to spray, when to load, and which grapes to grow.”
Incidentally, the grapes are delicious. “Syrah is the best,” Melham declares, handing me a handful. They pop like blueberries, with a nice kick. “It struggles sometimes, not just in Lebanon. Syrah is the most important grape in the world. You just can’t make a good wine without Syrah!”
On the way back to the winery, we hit a junction: to the right, a field full of cannabis—green and golden, swaying in the breeze—and, to the left, a vineyard full of Spanish Tempranillo taking well to the soil.
