‘The grapes won't wait': Lebanese winemakers fight to survive as war rages

The Guardian

01-03-2025

In September Elias Maalouf and his father were sitting in Chateau Rayak, the family winery in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, when they decided to head home for a lunch break. Five minutes later an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on a house across the street, crushing the three-storey building and destroying much of the winery.
'If we hadn't left we would have died,' said 41-year-old Maalouf, sitting in the winery as repair workers replaced a shattered television five months later. The doors had blown in from the force of the blast and shattered glass had rained down on the table where he now sat, the wood of the furniture still pockmarked from shrapnel.
An hour after the bombing, Maalouf returned to the winery and started repairs. He swept up broken bottles, some of them more than 20 years old, removed a severed foot that landed in front of his storage room and collected broken equipment in his distillery.
'All I could smell was wine. You always enjoy the smell of your own wine, but that day it was the worst smell I could imagine. It was the smell of my loss,' he said.
Maalouf lost about 40,000 bottles and £158,600 in damages. He had to leave 60 tons of grapes to wither on the vine.
An increase in fighting across the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and Israel started on 8 October 2023, after the Iran-backed group had launched missiles into Israel 'in solidarity' with Palestinians following the 7 October Hamas-led attack and the start of Israeli bombing of Gaza, kicking off 13 months of war.
So far, the fighting has left more than 3,900 people dead in Lebanon, displaced more than 1million people and left parts of the south, the Bekaa valley and the capital, Beirut, in ruins.
For Lebanon's winemakers, the war has been catastrophic. The country's wine industry is one of the oldest in the world and produced 7m bottles a year before the war, including the famous Chateau Musar. But it relies heavily on tourism, with many of the small boutique vineyards that have popped up in the last 15 years dependent on visitors and events for their livelihoods.
Maalouf has little hope of receiving compensation from Hezbollah, which promised funding to those affected by the war but, as an Islamist group, would not fund the reconstruction of a winery. Unknown to him, the building Maalouf had seen across the street was a Hezbollah drone production facility, a prime target for Israel.
It is not the first time that war has interrupted Maalouf's winemaking. The same land whose rich soil suffused his wine with flavour and the same country whose rich history inspired his craft had, at times, also jeopardised it.
His family history is intertwined with the grapevines that they have cultivated for more than five generations in Rayak. His wines reflect that history: one is named Station after the Ottoman-era railway station that used to be in Rayak, another is titled The Good Old Days', bearing the pictures of Rayak's 1950s cinema on the bottle. That history was interrupted only once before, during Lebanon's 15-year civil war which plunged the country's many sects into a cycle of retaliatory violence. Maalouf returned to Lebanon and resumed work at the winery in 1997, with the guidance of his 92-year-old grandfather.
Despite the danger, Maalouf was determined not to allow his family's wine to stop flowing for a second time. 'I'm here to stay,' he said. 'When you see your winery, your dreams broken, then you know you can't give up.'
Roland Abou-Khater, who runs Coteaux du Liban in the city of Zahle in the Bekaa valley, also refused to let the war stop him from producing wine. In recent months, when he heard the bombing stop, he would raise a white flag on his truck, race to the vineyard, and begin to harvest.
He transported the grapes in trucks which had their roofs removed, so that Israeli drones could see that the vehicles posed no threat – a trick he had learned from his father in the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war.
'He used to tell me that the grapes will never wait for the war to end, and that we couldn't just leave the grapes on the vine,' said 29-year-old Abou-Khater, who runs the vineyard along with his wife, Tamara Gebara.
The vineyard produces about 150,000 bottles a year, mainly for export to Europe. Although both Abou-Khater and Gebara were trained in winemaking techniques in France, they insist on using grape varieties indigenous to Lebanon.
Their bottle of 2024 Obaideh, named for the eponymous Lebanese white grape variety, reflects the hard ground it is grown in – the minerality of the wine a product of the high limestone content of the Bekaa's soil.
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Despite their best efforts, they still lost 30 tons of grapes. They were unable to bottle some of their wines on schedule during the war, as they had a shortage of imported corks. Air freight was stopped along with all other flights to Lebanon, with the exception of the national carrier.
'We had to ferment without knowing if we could ever sell. The grapes would not wait, the wine will not wait,' said 33-year-old Gebara.
In south Lebanon, closer to the border with Israel, winemakers had to contend with widespread environmental destruction. Up to 2,192 hectres (5,414 acres) of vines were burned by Israeli munitions, tens of thousands of olive trees were razed and thousands of livestock killed, according to the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research.
In addition, environmentalists fear that the widespread use in south Lebanon of white phosphorus munitions, which produce a thick, toxic smoke, will have a long-lasting effect on the environment. The sticky, black tar-like remnants of the munition can can reignite upon exposure to oxygen.
In a study, Lebanon's ministry of environment found elevated levels of heavy metals and 900 times the amount of phosphorus in soil hit by artillery and white phosphorus bombs. Scientists are still testing the soil in south Lebanon to see if there are any long-term effects that could pose a danger to public health and agriculture.
Although their Les Vignes du Marje vineyard was not directly hit by any Israeli bombs, Carol Tayyar Khoury and her husband Imad Khoury did not use any of the grapes from their plot in Marjeyoun, a town 8km from the Lebanon-Israel border. 'None of the land was hit by white phosphorus but just in case, we didn't use any grapes from Marjeyoun, because we were afraid of people asking if white phosphorus affected the wines,' said Carol. To protect their wine from being shaken in their tanks from nearby bombardments, the Khourys transferred the liquid to a second location away from the border in July 2024.
The bottles had to be transported very slowly under cover of darkness, as exposing them to sunlight and shaking could spoil the contents. Israel and Hezbollah were more active in bombing at night, so the journey was not without its risks.
Keeping the wine still throughout the journey meant that they had to drive painstakingly slowly, turning what should have been a two-hour journey into more than four hours, as the threat of bombardment loomed overhead.
'This was the longest night of my life,' Khoury said.
With the war over after a ceasefire in November and a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon, Lebanese winemakers are rebuilding and looking forward to better days.
Maalouf is already working on a new bottle of wine, named Juliana, after his wife, who he proposed to in the first 10 minutes after meeting. The bottle will be his latest volume on the history of his family and the town they come from, the loves they have had and the wars they have seen, all told through the wine they drink.