New Year’s Eve will be the tenth anniversary of the death of Serge Hochar, the Lebanese winemaker and owner of Château Musar whose ‘war record’ was almost as famous as his winery. With the Middle East again tearing itself apart, Hochar’s gift of turning adversity into opportunity will not have been lost on the current generation of Lebanese producers. Once more they are tested by regional conflict, digging deep into their crisis-management DNA to produce and market the 12 million bottles their tiny-blighted nation makes each year.
‘We have to do what we have to do,’ said George Sara from Château Ksara, Lebanon’s oldest and biggest producer. ‘Since the war expanded, there have been constant air attacks in the Bekaa Valley and we had to be very cautious about venturing into the vineyards but thankfully the harvest is complete and the juice is in the tanks. This is one less thing to worry about but no one knows when all this will end.’
Serge Hochar: ‘a frontiersman’
Hochar, who died age 75 in a swimming accident in the sea off the Mexican resort of Acapulco, made Château Musar one of the great wines of the world. His formula was simple: dazzlingly unorthodox wines, a warm and convivial personality and a thundering good story. He was a slight, dapper man imbued with a huge sense of impish fun, making great wine where, in the eyes of the wine community, wine was not expected to be made. That, paradoxically, it was the very same place where the first commercial wine was produced roughly 3,500 years ago only served to feed the enigma.
Thus, from the outset, he was seen as a frontiersman, a missionary winemaker among the heathens, an impression reinforced by his genuine sense of spirituality. Again, perhaps paradoxically, this was combined with a taste for all the sensual pleasures life could afford him. He was a man whose conversation could move seamlessly from God, to wine, to life, to love and even to sex. No wonder so many people found him such good company.
His wines were earthy and wild but they could frustrate as much as they could thrill. Defined by higher-than-normal volatile acidity and a generous helping of Brett, many critics dismissed them as tired and old fashioned.
That didn’t bother his fans one bit. They believed his wines to be extraordinary, thoughtful and beautiful, profound expressions not only of an ancient and powerful terroir, but also of Hochar’s often contrary personality – one that sought out enjoyment in all its forms, yet which was mesmerised by, and had huge respect for, the mystery and power of nature.
And like all good PR people, Hochar understood what Shakespeare called ‘the tide in the affairs of man’ and by golly did he take it at the flood. In 1979, four years after the outbreak of the Civil War, Hochar and his brother Ronald decided it was a case of ‘export or die’. They took their wines to the Bristol wine fair and were introduced to Michael Broadbent, the pinstriped pillar of the wine establishment working at the time for Christie’s.
Broadbent invited Hochar to hold a vertical tasting at Christie’s one week later and, in his annual round-up in Decanter, declared that he had discovered one of the ‘eye-openers’ of the year. ‘At the Bristol wine fair, I tasted a range of Lebanese reds made from classic French grapes by a charming enthusiast, Serge Hochar, trained in Bordeaux. Called Château Musar, the 1967 was outstanding and inexpensive, the 1961 and 1959 great. Hard to describe, full, soft – a bit of claret, a touch of Burgundy.’
Winemaking amid war
Hochar understood the British affinity for the Levant and their love of the underdog. When the question was asked how he was able to make wine during war, Hochar told them a story that could have been ripped from the pages of an Alastair MacLean adventure.
‘What can I say? We had problems with transporting our grapes overland and we had trouble shipping our wines overseas. That is war.’ He told me in 2004. ‘I knew 1983 was going to be a bad year. We harvested 40 days late and then there was the fiasco with the transport. You cannot imagine how many routes we used that year to get past all the various militias.’
Suddenly, Château Musar wasn’t just a decent wine from an obscure region; it was a symbol of resilience and hope. Uncorking a bottle came with a whiff of conflict and it was marketing gold dust.
For the record, Lebanon’s other producers were also risking life and limb for their wines. They included Jean-Pierre Sara at Château Ksara who was kidnapped twice on his way to work; Michel de Bustros of Château Kefraya, whose estate was home to an Israeli tank unit from 1982-85 and whose colourful French winemaker Yves Morard was mistaken for a terrorist and whisked off to Israel as a POW before eventually being repatriated to France, from where he caught the first plane to Beirut.
In 2006, during another short but brutal war, Ramzi Ghosn, the owner and winemaker at Massaya, stayed at the winery as shrapnel from Israeli missiles fizzed around his vines. At one point, the bombardment became so intense he ran half-clothed from his cottage on the estate and lay in a drainage trench for several hours until the fighting stopped.
Understanding Hochar’s legacy
What of Hochar’s winemaking legacy? In the past ten years, Lebanon’s producers have been – literally and metaphorically – going back to their roots in search of more ‘authentic’ wines. Step forward Lebanon’s adopted children: Cinsault, Carignan and Grenache, the varieties brought back from Algeria by the Jesuit monks who founded what is now Château Ksara in 1857. The Carignan and the Cinsault, famously form two thirds of Musar’s famous wine. (The other variety is Cabernet Sauvignon, a relatively recent introduction to the Bekaa Valley.)
With more confidence and experience, Lebanese winemakers now produce elegant, fresh wines that belie their hot-climate origins
Hochar, who studied under the legendary Émile Peynaud, would never tire of declaring that ‘the Cabernet is the skeleton, the Carignan the flesh and the Cinsault the perfume’. Cod philosophy aside, he had a point. These sturdy Southern Rhône workhorses have always found beautiful expression in the high altitude Bekaa Valley and today, after nearly a quarter of a century of being dismissed as blending grapes suitable only for ‘entry-level’ wines, many more Lebanese wine makers are now proudly producing their own vieille vigne varietals.
They have more credibility than the international grapes planted in the 90s (Merlot in particular has not entirely lived up to expectations) and have helped create a genuine identity for a hot, high-altitude wine region. A strong Francophone identity offers consumers something a little more thoughtful than the muscular, over-extracted, heavily oaked international-style reds for which post-Civil War Lebanon became known.
Ditto the whites. In the ten years since Hochar’s death, Lebanese whites – mostly Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier but also Clairette, Sémillon, Marsanne and Muscat – have been a genuine revelation. Again, with more confidence and experience of working with new varieties at very high altitudes, Lebanese winemakers now produce elegant, fresh wines that belie their hot-climate origins.
Crucially, more respect has been given to the indigenous grapes, in particular the Merwah and the Obeideh, varieties that Hochar used in his top white. The conventional thinking up until ten years ago was that these varieties were a bit plebeian; unable to deliver decent wine and best used in the making of arak, the anise-based eau de vie. They simply couldn’t understand that these ancient grapes gave Lebanon a stamp of authenticity. But Hochar walked to a different beat. Not only did he embrace Merwah and Obeideh, he put them in his best white wine and that made him something of a visionary. Now any Lebanese producer worth his salt uses one or both of the varieties.
In the ten years since his death, no Lebanese winemaker has filled Hochar’s shoes. None have matched his combination of old world, libertine charm with seriously radical, almost spiritual, winemaking. But the resilience and ingenuity that made his reputation remains: ‘We have lived through war, social upheaval and political instability,’ says Sara. ‘We factor all these into our business model. It’s mental toughness. We are very good at problem solving in a crisis. As long as the roads, airport and port are open, we can do business. We are Lebanese after all.’
Wines of Lebanon: The Journey Continues by Michael Karam (photographs by Norbert Schiller) will be published in 2025
