Wild Yeast and Native Grapes in Lebanon

By Rebecca Holland

Though it’s small, Lebanon has very diverse wine regions, so one appellation likely won’t be enough. Photo by Rebecca Holland.

In Zahlé, Lebanon, using grapes grown on the hillsides of the Beqaa Valley, Roland Abou-Khater is making organic wine with native Lebanese grapes and working to create the country’s first appellation. Down the road, Eddie Chami and Walid Habchy are turning cannabis fields into vineyards and bottling the country’s first pét-nat. In the mountains of Batroun, Maher Harb is making the country’s first biodynamic wines from gorgeous terraced vines and evangelizing Lebanese terroir.

This is the new generation of Lebanese winemakers. They’re focused on Lebanon’s identity, native grapes and going back to the past to create the future.

The Phoenicians made wine in what is now Lebanon as early as the 7th century B.C. They brought viticulture across the Mediterranean and to France, and even made glass containers for wine. Later, the Romans spread wine culture across the region and notably built their temple to Bacchus, the god of wine and viticulture, in Baalbek, not France or Italy. Chateau Kefraya, one of the older wineries in Lebanon, is built atop Roman ruins and even houses an ancient Roman press. For three centuries after the Romans, the Ottomans occupied the area and forbade wine, but Jesuits traveling to Lebanon from North Africa brought it back in the 1850s, reviving Lebanon’s winemaking traditions with cinsault and carignon––French grapes.

 This year, Abou-Khater made a natural wine with 65-year-old cinsault vines.

“We fermented with wild yeasts, without any kind of additive, like our grandfathers used to make it. Not even using electricity and machines, just our hands and feet in open barrels,” Abou-Khater says. “What’s fun is we’re doing something new, but what’s new is actually old.”

Abou-Khater’s story starts with his father, Nicolas Abou-Khater, an agricultural engineer passionate about wine who studied enology at the University of Burgundy and bought grapes from friends to start a winery in his garage. Heineken hired Nicolas to build a winery in Egypt that produced 20 million bottles per year, and he used the money to buy vineyards in Lebanon. In 2006, he bought basic old equipment and had his first harvest 10 days after the war with Israel.

“We put white flags on our trucks during harvest just in case,” Abou-Khater says.

Then, at age 40, Nicolas Abou-Khater died in a car accident.

“She didn’t know how to open a bottle of wine, but out of love for her husband, took over,” says Roland about his mother, who went on to turn Coteaux du Liban into what it is today.

Roland followed in his father’s footsteps, studied agricultural engineering, went to study in Burgundy, took over the family business. His girlfriend Tamara who works with him at the winery trained in France for five years. Now, he’s working to turn Cinsault into the “pinot noir of the Middle East” and to “let the wine find its own balance.”

Coteaux du Liban produces 70,000 bottles per year and exports to 11 countries across Europe and the U.S. 

“My main goal is to make wines with character and structure, but that are fresh and drinkable,” he says.

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Winemakers like Abou-Khater are having fun. In a small country with a long history of wine and a lot of potential, one that’s not as well known on a national stage, winemakers can experiment.

Lebanon does have native grapes. Obaideh and merwah, two white grapes, are popular and used in both wine and arak. Obaideh is sweet and creamy, tastes like honey and lemon, while merwah is floral, nutty, and citrusy. Chateau Ksara, the oldest winery in Lebanon, makes a merwah from 60-year-old vines; Chateau Musar, another early winery, blends the two; and Chateau Kefraya does the same, adding another grape–mekssesse–in its Adéenne wine.

Older wineries have embraced these indigenous grapes, but newer wineries are pushing boundaries further. Harb makes a biodynamic skin-contact obaideh that tastes nothing like the others.

“I want people when they drink my wine, whether they like it or not, to say this is something unique,” he says. “I want to be the freest winemaker in the world.”

A former consultant with a math degree, Harb didn’t come into contact with the wine world until 2009, when, at 27 years old, he realized he was “happiest in the mountains” and followed a friend’s advice to learn to make wine. When Maher was 7, his father was killed during the civil war, but working in Lille, France, Harb felt connected to him. “I was living with him now,” he says. He came back to Lebanon to “make wine on the land of my father.” Harb built terraces, started reading wine books at work and finally planted 5,000 French grapes in January 2012.

“It was an amazing experience for me,” he says. “It was snowing, freezing, I had a fever...but it made me realize how hard but also how satisfying it would be.”

Despite little experience, he talked his way into a slot in a masters in wine management program in France, through which he traveled around the world and tasted more than 10,000 wines.

“I realized the only way to do winemaking is immersion,” he says.

Harb follows the moon calendar, uses only wild yeast and natural temperatures, and ages all his wines on lees in tanks for a year or more. His wines––whether made from native grapes or not––taste as much like the place they’re grown as possible.

 “You have to believe and trust nature,” he says. “This is an honest expression of the terroir.”

Terroir, or a vin de lieu, is the raison d’être for Maher. He wants to create an identity for Lebanese wine and for people to understand the differences across the country, and he’s not alone.

“If we want to build a future we need to give identity in our wines,” says Fabrice Guiberteau, Château Kefraya’s winemaker. “Not copying a French or American model, but to create an innovative model of our own.”

Lebanon produces 8 or 9 million bottles per year, and Chateau Kefraya makes up about 1.4 million of that. This is nothing compared to other well-known wine producing countries, so Guiberteau says Lebanon should compete on quality over volume. 

“My approach is not to be the small colonial French in Lebanon,” he says, but rather to create Lebanese wine and do something profitable for the country.

Kefraya was founded in 1951, started as a vineyard to grow grapes for other wineries. It didn’t start producing its own wine until the end of the 1970s. Today, Guiberteau says it is a chateau in the French meaning, an estate devoted specifically to winemaking and essentially its own appellation. He does not buy grapes from anyone else and he doesn’t irrigate.

While Kefraya started with French grapes, Guiberteau makes a point to work with native Lebanese varieties.

“It’s important to revive viniculture here, to make people discover the capacity of Lebanon to produce good wine and to show terroir potential,” he says. “If you have a deep story like Lebanon, it’s important to retrieve and find your future into your own past without comparing the French influence.”

Guiberteau is French, by the way, and could easily grow French grapes and make excellent wine. He came to Lebanon in 2006 and is frustrated with winemakers who don’t go outside of their comfort areas.

“I wanted to challenge myself by making something I don’t really know and making things more interesting,” he says. “To focus on each detail like you are writing back the story of this Lebanon identity and this is what I really love.”

Guiberteau is working on red indigenous grape varieties, experimenting to reveal the best of Lebanon’s terroir. Lebanon produces 80% red wines, so though obeideh and merwah are popular, a native red grape could be more successful. Guiberteau is working with universities and other research organizations to reintegrate the aswaad karech and asmi noir grape varieties, which he says are considered genetically from Lebanon, though DNA tests are still underway.

“It’s very important to be unique,” Guiberteau says. “For me, a vineyard is like a person. Each has its own story, its own character, own way of thinking, its own past. It is only with your past that you will understand your future. This is very important.” 

It’s not only grapes. Phoenicians made wine in large clay amphoras, so it was “unbelievable” to Guiberteau that modern Lebanese winemakers weren’t doing the same. He started making his Amphora wine, the first to be released since the Phoenicians, in clay jars.

“We fermented with wild yeasts, without any kind of additive, like our grandfathers used to make it. Not even using electricity and machines, just our hands and feet in open barrels,” says Roland Abou-Khater. Photo courtesy Abou-Khater/Coteaux de Liban.

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In Deir el Ahmar, a village about 10 miles from the Temple of Bacchus, Walid Habchy and Charbel Fakhri are working to turn hashish fields into vineyards through the Cooperative Coteaux d’Heliopolis, or Heliopolis Cooperative. They planted their first vines in 2001, and today the cooperative has more than 300 growers, each with one hectare of vines.

“Grapes are equally as economical as cannabis, but they’re safe, they’re legal, there’s no stigma, you can make vinegar, wine, arak or sell the grapes,” says Habchy.

In 2013, Chami met Habchy and became so interested in wine he went to study the science of it at University of California, Davis. Soon after, they started Couvent Rouge winery, which purchases grapes from the cooperative and makes a wine on the cooperative’s behalf, the Coteaux Les Cedres. This year, Chami made Lebanon’s first pét-nat, called Leb-Nat.

“No one else was doing it, making a natural sparkling wine,” he says.

The wine, a blend of syrah and obaideh and beautiful, fizzy pink, has proved very popular. So much so that Eddie struck out on his own and has new experiments planned for the future. Like Guiberteau, he’s looking into red indigenous grapes and going through the DNA process to make sure they’re not a relative of grenache or alicante Bouschet.

Chami is taking Abdullah Richi, a Syrian refugee winemaker in Lebanon with his own label called Dar Richi, with him to his new brand. Richi practices low-intervention winemaking with spontaneous fermentation to make a delicious blend of cabernet sauvignon, malbec and sangiovese. The wine is meant as an investment toward a winery he hopes to build in Syria one day, and also an expression of Lebanon’s terroir and how these grapes can differ across continents.

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“Today you can find a cab sauv wherever you want in the earth, but to find a special blend, something deeper in this wine––something more signature, is special,” says Guiberteau.

That signature doesn’t necessarily have to be from a native grape. Some grapes have been grown in Lebanon for 150 years, and wineries have made them their own, like Abou-Khater with cinsault, Harb’s syrah, or Chami’s Leb-Nat. This is the view of Chateau Ksara, the country’s oldest and biggest winery.

“Our so-called French wines are not going away,” says George Khalil Sara, co-owner of Ksara. “They still represent over 90 percent of Lebanon’s production.”

He sees progress for Lebanese grapes, noting that 10 years ago very few people outside of Lebanon knew about merwah or obaideh, and that is no longer the case. But while he sees innovation in the future, he’s less willing to abandon tradition.

“Each winery has its own ethos and strategy, mainly depending on its size. We are the oldest and the biggest, so our’s...is to proudly play our role as a national icon,” he says. “We like to think we are the wine the Lebanese drink, at home and abroad, while doing our best to make exciting, relevant and correct wines.”

Ksara produces 3 million bottles per year, large for Lebanon. Like others, Sara thinks an appellation or set of standards would be helpful. That’s what Guiberteau, Abou-Khater and others are trying to do in creating Lebanon’s first appellation.

“We don’t have a framework that says this is what a Bekaa wine is, what a Batroun wine is,” says wine expert and host of the ‘B is for Bacchus’ wine podcast Farrah Berrou. “We are still defining what Lebanese wine is.”

She says the country is still very rooted in the French presence but needs to create something it can call its own.

“Because wine is such a slow thing and you need patience to really discover your identity as a winemaking country, I don’t think the transition is going to happen quickly. But there is a strong wine culture in Lebanon, and it needs to be put on the map,” she says.  

Though it’s small, Lebanon has very diverse wine regions, so one appellation likely won’t be enough. Guiberteau calls this a “very, very hot subject.”

“If you do a comparison to the size of Lebanon and the size of Bordeaux, they are similar, but in Bordeaux we have 11-15 different appellations,” he says. “For me there is no sense to do only one appellation in Lebanon. This is something completely wrong.”

Take Sept’s syrah and petite sirah. There is a difference between them and syrahs at other wineries in Lebanon.

“This means there’s a terroir difference,” Guiberteau says. “We need to let people have a certain kind of identity. It’s very important to show this diversity and today we need it more than before.”

That’s because, despite making excellent wine and a growing international appreciation for it, things are tough in Lebanon.

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On August 4, an explosion at Beirut’s port killed more than 200 people, left more than 6,500 injured and 300,000 people homeless, and decimated entire neighborhoods. Even before the blast, the country was in economic turmoil and people had been protesting a corrupt and mismanaged government for almost a year.

“Creating this Lebanese identity is exciting, but I’m worried now that they’re facing so many more hurdles than they should be in a period like this,” Berrou says. “When you’re in the adolescent state of trying to figure out who you are, going through all this trauma at the same time, it’s going to affect how much you can blossom.”

There are restraining factors––the financial and local market being hit from every direction, instability, no tourism, a global pandemic. It’s a lot of layers to work through while trying to stay afloat and be profitable. Wineries have to depend on the export market, but importers aren’t always likely to work with a tiny producer in a tiny country. Still, winemakers are better off than people in many other industries in the current economic climate, because at least exporting is an option. 

People are working it out in different ways. Abou-Khater makes wine almost exclusively for export. At Sept, Harb’s bottles are the highest priced in Lebanon, sold mostly on-site (often to tourists before 2020), and only sold in U.S. dollars. Couvent Rouge also sells mostly for export.

“We are dependent on ourselves, not the government,” Chami says. “Our survival is based on the global wine trade, not local.”

Sept’s bottles are among the highest priced, sold in U.S. dollars and mostly on site. Photo by Rebecca Holland.

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A small circle of wine professionals and adventurous drinkers or travelers know Lebanon makes good wine, but when the average American or European thinks about Lebanon, wine is not the first thing on their mind. Yet Lebanon is home to the highest altitude vineyards in the northern hemisphere at 1,200 meters, and it gets 300 days of sun per year.

“To take the northern Bekaa Valley terroir outside of Lebanon and put it in perspective, we have higher acidity and a lower pH, so we can make natural wine, lower-alcohol wine, more fruit-forward wine, driven by less rainfall and more sun,” says Chami.

So, why don’t people know this?

“First, we need to change the image of Lebanon,” says Abou-Khater, and Berrou agrees.

“There’s this idea that the Middle East is very closed-minded and not drinkers, or that we don’t have this culture or don’t have this in our history, but it hasn’t always been the way it is now,” she says. “The violence or some of the other unfortunate things in the region––this isn’t something normal for people here either.”

Since the explosion, there’s been an increase in Lebanese wine sales. Helpful, but Berrou hopes people aren’t simply buying for charity’s sake and are instead trying wines from smaller producers and finding something they really love, which in turn helps even more.

“The more you try, the more you dabble in new areas, the more you tell other people, the more you ask for it from wine retailers, then the more demand increases and the more retailers want to expand their portfolio to include not just the main names people already know. They might look at smaller producers, and on and on,” Berrou says.

Visiting, once it’s safe to travel again, is one of the best ways to learn about Lebanon’s diverse terroirs and give the country a financial boost.

Like Guiberteau says, “If you want to discover wine coming from a country amongst the oldest in the wine world, with a rich history and very unique terroir, you need to try Lebanese wines.”