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Château Musar, Legend of Lebanon

Few wines inspire or impassion me as Château Musar. Let me say straight away that I love this wine, but it (both the red and the white) often needs years of aging to obtain the taste for which is it known, and its aroma and taste are only part of the reason I feel so strongly about the wine. The rest is history and a wise man’s vibrant philosophy.

Viticulture in Lebanon was introduced 6000 years ago by the Phoenicians and most likely “the wine of Canaan” which the Bible mentions is the wine of southern Lebanon. Were I to be allowed only one wine for the rest of eternity, it might well be this biblical wine, the wine of Château Musar.

The legend began when Gaston Hochar, a Maronite Christian raised in a family of bankers and traders, decided to go to Paris in 1928. There he fell in love with French wine and returned to Lebanon to begin winemaking, scandalizing his aristocratic family who saw winemaking as something only farmers did, not sons of bankers. For the site of his vineyards, Gaston chose the Bekaa Valley between the Lebanon Mountains and the Anti-Lebanon mountains to the east. Vineyards have existed in the Bekaa for 2,000 years and the conditions for growing vines are pretty near perfect. The problem was, then as now, the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border was unstable, thus Gaston housed the winery in a 17thC château in Ghazir just north of Beirut where it would be safe.

Move forward to 1959 and Gaston’s son Serge, the real magician behind the wine, although he would disagree, claiming like the terroirists that it is nature and not the winemaker who makes great wine. So strongly does Serge Hochar believe in his wine that one day in 1990 when the Syrians began shelling Beirut, and he was alone in his apartment, he did not flee to the bomb shelter in the basement as was the drill. He had already, years earlier, sent his wife and three children to France so they wouldn’t be killed in the continual war, and on this morning he walked slowly over to his wine closet and inspected his vintages of Château Musar. His neighbors came knocking at the door, yelling and urging him to the basement, but still he did not go. Instead he chose for himself a bottle of 1972 Château Musar, the first wine he’d made after taking over from his father and a wine bottled before the insane and tragic war had ever begun. He opened the wine, let it breathe then poured the entire bottle into a giant crystal goblet. He did not walk to the bomb shelter, but returned to his bedroom and settled onto the bed with the ’72 Musar and the book he’d been reading that morning. And every time a bomb exploded, Serge reached for his wine. After twelve hours, the shelling had finally stopped and Serge Hochar had finished the bottle of ’72 Musar.

Of the experience he speaks gently but movingly: “But would you believe me if I told you this was a great experience between me and my wine? This was the greatest conversation I ever had with my wine. Each time a shell landed, I would take a sip and ask the wine, ‘What do you have to say to me now?’ And the wine would talk to me. It would tell me its memories about the soil and sunlight and the taste of water. It could remember these things! It remembered all of history! And when a wine knows you are paying attention, it will reveal things to you that you would not believe. The things this wine revealed, this made me think of all my memories, of my whole life. Then I would take another sip, and it would give me more… I could see that this is a living relationship. That this is a living wine and I am a living man, and when we come together—even around all this death—it is a relationship between two living beings. And this is the most important thing a person can ever experience—this feeling of life meeting life. Life meeting life. This is the only thing that matters.”

And the taste?

“What you taste,” he says, “is truth. My religion is wine. It is a gift which is a miracle of life. I am a Maronite Christian, but it is not there that the core of my humanity lies. It lies in accepting the other, in tolerance, which is the only lesson for humanity and which is one of the chief lesson that wine can teach.” How can wine teach tolerance? “When you understand that all the flavors and smells and memories you have experienced over the last hours [letting the wine breathe and sipping it as it changes] have come from the same wine, then you will learn not to condemn any wine until you have stayed with it through all its stages. When you understand that, then you can learn not to condemn any person until you have watched him through many stages, too. You even can learn to tolerate life through all its stages, never to make a complete judgment, always to know that there is more to be revealed. This is how taste can enhance your moral perceptions.”

Now perhaps you too are beginning to love this wine and the man who creates it. When tasting a great wine, he speaks of something that is beyond taste, by which he means that the memories and associations that a wine invokes are as or more important than the simply physical sensations. Great wines are complex and induce thinking, ideas, inspiration, or as he calls it, “Taste beyond taste.” Perhaps Shakespeare was referring to the same idea when he said, “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.”

Serge Hochar produces red, white, rosé as well as Arak, Lebanon’s national beverage (an anise-based spirit, like France’s Pastis or Greece’s Ouzo.) Château Musar is the most noble as well as most pricy of his wines, but there is also Hochar, a younger wine than Musar, and Rubis, once my wine of choice in Paris, but now only available on the Lebanese market.

Château Musar’s white wines are dry and made from a blend of Obeideh and Merwah which are native to the Bekaa Valley and most likely the ancestors of Chardonnay and Semillion respectively. The color is golden so tends to give the impression of a sweet white, an impression furthered by Serge’s custom of serving his white unchilled and at the end of the meal. Try these whites the way he recommends—they are unlike any wine you’ve likely had before.

The reds are stunning and completely different from year to year. I’ve sampled Château Musar from five different decades and have favorites in all, with ’85, ’86 and ’88 holding special memories. The wines can taste of fruit or spice or meat or perhaps the earth and the land of Lebanon herself. When you sip them, do so slowly, letting them change and evolve in the glass, and Serge will be pleased you’ve had a conversation with his wines. And when you do, close your eyes and try to taste truth.

Serge Hochar quotations taken from interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ.