The Lebanese gave wine to the world

I was given a copy of Jancis Robinson’s World Atlas of Wine for Christmas. It is a comprehensive and detailed reference of all the world’s wine regions. Lebanon which makes 10 million bottles a year (.03% of the annual global production) is understandably given much less room that other more famous and commercially important regions.

But…I often ask people if they know that Lebanon is one of the world’s oldest sites of winemaking and they nod their head in the way that suggests that they don’t really grasp the significance of what I’ve said. I suppose it’s just quite easy to imagine a Mediterranean country full of vines being a place where wine has been made for a very long time.

And in doing so, it’s very easy to miss the sheer historic magnitude of just where Lebanon sits in the history of wine. We make the French, the nation to whom some of us look to for our social culinary and aesthetic pointers, seem like relative newcomers.

Wine was not ‘invented’. It is a naturally occurring substance that happens when yeast acts on sugar to create alcohol (and carbon dioxide). Man probably first tasted alcohol by dipping his finger into fruit that had fallen off a tree, split open and fermented. The archaeologist Patrick McGovern, posited that as early man ventured out of Africa following direction of the Rift Valley, this momentous discovery could well have happened somewhere in the modern day Levant.

But it was the Neolithic Georgians, around 8,000 years ago, who were the first people to deliberately make fermented grape juice in wax-lined clay jars or qvevri. 

The culture of the vine then drifted down from the Caucuses to the Mediterranean coast where the Phoenicians, the early Lebanese famed for their trading empire, were the first people to, not only make it, bit to load it into on boats and sell it to the known world, which back then meant Greece, Rome, Carthage Crete, Spain and even Cornwall in the south of England where they famously traded for tin. Wine then spread to the rest of Europe, including what is now France and Germany, via the Etruscan states.

In doing this, the Phoenicians became the first wine merchants. They gave the gift of wine to the world.

The wines came from the city states of Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and to a lesser extent Beirut. Bybline, from Byblos, was considered the Grand Cru of the ancient world. When the pharaohs died, they took their worldly goods, including Bybline, into the pyramids with them to enjoy in the afterlife and it was Phoenicians whom the ancient Egyptians commissioned who built vineyards such was their famed skill in viticulture. To offer a wine from Lebanon was to serve the finest.

This is in no way to suggest that because we were among the first that we necessarily make the best, but it’s important to stress that wine isn’t something we’ve just come to in recent decades.

One thousand years after the Phoenician trading empire what at its apogee, when what is now Lebanon was part of the eastern fringes of the Roman empire, the cult of the vine in the Bekaa Valley was so strong that a temple to Bacchus was built in Heliopolis, now Baalbek. It is the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world and a testament to the importance of the vine and wine culture in the region. The Bekaa is not just our agricultural heartland. It is a historic area of supreme importance when discussing the history of viticulture.

So next time you drink a wine made with Merwah, Obeideh, Meksassi, Marini or Aswad Kerash, it might make the drinking experience all the more enjoyable to know that, not only are they indigenous Lebanese grapes but they are profoundly historical varieties that have shaped nearly 3,000 years of wine drinking culture.

And for the record France only started making wine in 500BC.