Family’s Winery Presses On Despite Strife in Lebanon : Unknown Only a Decade Ago, Acclaimed Chateau Musar One of Nation’s Few Success Stories

The Chateau Musar sits at the end of a serpentine mountain road and offers a commanding view of the Bay of Juniyah below, where an early spring squall was buffeting sailboats under a sky the color of lead.

The news from Beirut was equally gloomy, dominated by talk of Islamic fundamentalism in the ascendant and an economy collapsing around Lebanon’s war-weary people. But Serge Hochar came bounding out of the century-old villa with his optimism intact and waving a wine glass like an conductor’s baton.

Leading two visitors down a flight of damp steps, Hochar stopped to gaze admiringly at his treasure trove. In the cobwebbed depths of the building were hundreds of oak casks laid out in neat, numbered rows. In the casks, wine was gently growing old.

Although it was virtually unknown in the West a decade ago, the wines produced at the Chateau Musar winery 20 miles north of Beirut have recently won international acclaim. In the process, Lebanon’s entire wine industry has emerged as a bountiful export earner, representing one of the few success stories in this war-ravaged nation.

“I like to keep my assets liquid,” Hochar jokes to visitors who invariably express astonishment that such an enterprise not only endures, but prospers in Lebanon.

Operated with Serge and his brother Ronald, the Chateau Musar winery produces a million bottles of wine a year. More than 75% is exported to Europe and the United States. Two years ago, exports accounted for less than one-third of production. The change is a sign that the hard economic times at home and the spread of Islam, which forbids the consumption of alcohol, have taken their toll on the domestic market.

The grapes for the wine are grown in Kifaya, Amiik and Ana, Christian villages in the Bekaa Valley, 60 miles east of here, an area that many historians believe to be the birthplace of wine nearly 4,000 years ago. The grapes and the secret of wine making were carried to Europe by Roman legions two millennium later, they theorize.

With Syrian troops in control of the Bekaa Valley and the area isolated from the Christian enclave of east Beirut, making wine here is no easy task.

After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the front lines of Syrian and Israeli armies in the Bekaa passed through the Hochar vineyards, and 50 acres of grapes were lost.

In 1984, the roads between the vineyards and the winery were cut. The grapes were transported by trucks from Syrian positions through Israeli lines, through the Shouf Mountains commanded by the Druze militia to Sidon, where they were loaded on boats. When they arrived at the winery, the grapes had already begun to ferment and were ruined.

Lowering his head as if bereaved, Hochar noted solemnly that there will be almost no 1984 Chateau Musar production because of the war. The British wine magazine Decanter named Hochar its man of the year in 1984 for surviving against such odds.

Effects of War

While the threat of direct war has momentarily passed, the Hochars must now contend with the continuing fallout from Lebanon’s 11 years of conflict: With the Lebanese currency worth only a fraction of its former value, the import of $500 oak casks from France, for example, has become prohibitively expensive.

A French wine expert who used to live in Ghazir to assist the Hochars has long since moved to Cyprus; now he makes a rare trip aboard a boat to Lebanon when the climates, meteorological and military, permit.

“If we considered our name had no future in Lebanon we could have sold out and gone to France or California,” said Ronald Hochar, who handles the financial affairs of the winery. “We didn’t leave because we believe. It’s not a question of money, but a question of faith in this country.”

Serge is almost dismissive of talk about the winery’s recent financial successes, refusing to divulge any financial data. He argues that wine making is “more like painting” than a business. For him, the primary effect of the war is that it “affects my wine making abilities. When you suffer, you do things differently.”

Whatever it is that Serge Hochar does, he must be doing it right. The paeans of praise flow like the local red wine: “To discover a Cabernet of such quality from Lebanon was astonishing,” American wine critic Terry Robards wrote of a bottle of 1970 Chateau Musar.

The grapes used by Hochar are mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, blended with Cinsault, Merlot and Syrah grapes. Wine experts say the taste is very close to the best California Cabernets.

Family Art of Wine Making

The Musar winery has been in operation since 1930, when it was founded by the Hochars’ father, Gaston, whose name still appears on the label. Ronald was trained as a lawyer, and Serge studied enology, or the science of wine, at the University of Bordeaux in France.

Serge’s talents as a wine maker have propelled the label into the front ranks of wine internationally, while Ksara and Kifraya, the other Lebanese labels, are known mostly in the Middle East region as acceptable, and very inexpensive, table wines.

On a stroll around the immense wine cellars of the chateau--a visitor cannot help remarking that they would make a fine bomb shelter--Serge noted that unlike most wines, which are blended at an early stage, Chateau Musar is aged first and then blended.

All the wines, except for the limited white wines produced here, are kept in the cellars for at least three years before being sold, while most are held for seven. Hence, they are only now beginning to ship the 1980 Chateau Musar, which accounts for only 20% of the firm’s production. There is also a cheaper blend, Cuvee Musar.

“If you can make it so it can age, it holds value,” Serge said, pulling samples from the casks and spitting out the wine in long arcs into a cedar bucket. Like most wine experts, Hochar never swallows during a tasting.

The family has embarked on a policy of establishing markets rather than increasing sales, which would be difficult because of their limited ability to increase production. They have recently appointed a new agent in the United States and are attempting to make the same inroads in the New York and Los Angeles markets that have recently been achieved in England.

“My dream is not to sell my wine for $50 a bottle but to know that the entire production of Chateau Musar would sell out in New York in, say, one day, like a good French wine,” Serge said. A bottle of the current vintage of Chateau Musar costs about $10 in the United States.