The Wet and the Dry (4 page)

Just as Mount Lebanon, Michael says, imparts a mysterious atmosphere of rain and mist and melancholy to the wines that are made there—like Château Musar—so this coast pours its pagan brightness and heat into juices. A land drenched by sea light, the hills of Kfifane, Edde, and Jrane.

We were driving to Coteaux de Botrys, a winery founded ten years ago by a retired Lebanese general named Joseph G. Bitar.
Bitar left it to his daughter Neila. Neila is a famous beauty. A redhead who sleeps with a loaded pistol under her pillow. After a long exile in Germany, she came back to Lebanon, like so many others. War drove this middle class away, and stability and yearning for home brought them back. They brought with them Europe’s alcoholic tastes, which were then grafted onto Lebanon’s own traditions—these are Christian families, and wine and arak are woven into their sense of self. Wine is sacral to the Maronites. But whereas they left the country as a slight majority, they have returned as a minority. The Muslim birthrate is higher, and the Christian grip on power has melted away.

It is the Christians who have created Lebanon’s new food and wine culture, selling their wines to the critics who fly in from the occidental metropolises, creating the “organic” eateries that serve as the frame. It is they who are drawing this country of the Middle East back toward European Epicureanism, with all the money and media voyeurism that go with it. As the only Arab country with a wine culture, it must be the bridge between those two entities canonized as East and West but that could also be called Wet and Dry, Alcoholic and Prohibited.

On either side of the small road, we soon saw the sloping vines of Coteaux de Botrys shining despite a pall of smoke, and the valley that falls down to the cranes and the construction dust of Batroun and the blue line of the sea. Wealthy villas crowned the hilltops. The redhead was already there in slippers, holding a bottle of Cuvée de l’Ange. The winery is just a house with a terrace, and Neila is a general’s daughter with a taste for grenache.

She had made a lunch with chicken stewed in beer. The
terrace looked over the valley of vines, and on the far side rose the country mansion of Beirut’s largest car salesman. It looked like a maximum-security prison surrounded by electric fences and arc lamps. We drank the Cuvée de l’Ange, a mix of Syrah, Mourvèdre, and grenache, and listened to the aerial echo of Israeli warplanes, which have right of passage over the whole country. Neila told me why she wanted to come back to Lebanon and make wine. There was something frail and watchful about her, a grimly delicate humor that waited to reveal itself. Her wine goes to the head. Michael also, as it happens, is a child of exile—his Lebanese father and Egyptian mother took their children to London to escape the civil war, and he returned only in the nineties, his Arabic almost forgotten. He had to learn his own language all over again. Yet his political roots in Lebanon are profound. His grandmother was early on involved in the Syrian National Party, which in the 1930s advocated the union of Lebanon and Syria, before it became quasi-fascist in recent years; his father’s family is old Mount Lebanon.

Both of them burn with an idea of what the future of the country might hold if a cosmopolitan and bibulous spirit were to become entrenched. Drink becomes the wedge of freedom in a land otherwise haunted by the religious men in black. So they looked down at Batroun, and Neila said, “It’s Greek and Phoenician, like us. Someone told me once that Dionysus set off for Greece from here. He went with the wine ships that traded with Attica.”

Dionysus might have been a Phoenician god originally from these mountains, exported through places like Botrys; a god whom the Greeks regarded as an import from the East and
whose earliest festivals were rooted in the Attic wine ports. But he was a dead god here now. The god of the desert was now in the ascendant once again.

With a papaya tart we drank Neila’s arak Kfifane, made from aniseed and
merweh
grape and distilled five times, and I asked her why she slept with a gun under her head.

“The goats, they eat the grapes. I shoot them.”

But also one never knows who will come out of those beautiful hills. A wine critic or a man with a Kalashnikov.

Parts of the Bekaa are modeling themselves on Napa or Bordeaux—the tourist seduction, the country inns, the twee foodie experiences. The wet and the dry, as it were, side by side in a spirit of mutual incomprehension, as in those counties in Texas where you can buy a beer in one and yet not drink it in the next one along. “I’ve heard,” Michael said, “you have to put a bottle of wine inside a paper bag when traveling on the New York subway. Is that true?” Naturally it is. On the street, in the subway, in a park. It is the same principle as the Victorians covering their piano legs. It would be unimaginable in Arab Beirut outside of Shia neighborhoods like Dahiya.

I said I had also noticed that Beirut had more lingerie stores than New York, and better ones, too. And for that matter Gemmayze had wilder bars than the Brooklyn I lived in. Each society engages in its own war on pleasure. The American war on pleasure is more total, perhaps, more earnest, because Lebanon in the end is a Mediterranean place, Greek and Phoenician as its people are always reminding you, as well as Arab. A glimpse of the Arabs as they would be without Islam.

I recalled a political meeting I went to in Dahiya with some
moderate Shia clerics. It was held in a community center at night, the doors watched by armed guards, and someone had asked the clerics if they thought their moderation would ever extend to allowing a bar to open in that neighborhood. It was intended as a humorous aside, and the clerics smiled along, stroking their nicely tailored beards and understanding that such questions are merely provocative. The answer was no.

At nightfall we went to Abdel Wahab in Ashrafieh on the street of that name, Abdel Wahab El Inglizi, named it is sometimes thought for some Englishman or other passing through Beirut. The restaurant has an upper terrace open to the sky, the tables widely spaced and filled with large parties at their ease. We ordered little sausages,
fatoosh, moutabal
, and
labneh
and a bottle of Le Brun from the Domaine des Tourelles in the Bekaa, considered by many the greatest arak of the Middle East.

A distilled rather than a fermented drink can be an experience of being “out of time,” and yet it does not obscure the past. A fermentation excites and fills one with optimism and lust; a distillation makes one morose, skeptical, and withdrawn.

We drank this Le Brun, and the latter feelings began to arise. But with them came a detachment, a sense of distance from the self that was refreshing. There was in this drink, also, a strong sense of place. Not just of Lebanon but of the Bekaa Valley where it was made. It came from the country’s oldest winery and distillery. Drinking it was not frivolous or carefree. It was like entering a church.

•  •  •

When the French engineer François-Eugène Brun came to the Bekaa Valley in 1868 to lay down the Damascus-to-Beirut railway for an Ottoman company, he found a Christian land worked by monks. Modest and probably thorny wines were made in the remote monasteries of the valley, and Brun decided to stay and make his own variation of them. Wines for the sacrament in the churches of Damascus and Beirut. The difference was that he intended to sell it in the cities. So was born Lebanon’s first commercial wine, and Brun’s descendants by marriage and inheritance still work the tiny Domaine des Tourelles, off the main road that runs through the farming town of Chtaura two hours from Beirut. The next day I went there.

After the last actual Brun, Pierre-Louis, died in 2000, the winery was bought by Nayla Kanaan Issa-el-Khoury and Elie Issa, descendants of the original Brun’s Lebanese wife. I was met by Christiane Issa, their daughter, who runs the company’s PR, and it is she who took me through the nineteenth-century warrens of little rooms stuffed with decayed Christ pictures and sacks of green aniseed with their grassy perfume and the tasting rooms with their shelves of Orangine and Brou de Noix and dusty wine medals from the 1930s. The Coq compressors from Aix looked as ancient as water wheels, and through the windows I could see the scarfed Shia girls walking between the walls and glancing over into the arak distillery, which is
haraam
, with a look in the eye that is difficult to define.

Since the Bekaa is Hezbollah’s stronghold, it is not impossible
that one day the Valley will stop making wine altogether. Christiane entertained this dark idea with a kind of apocalyptic relish.

“Think of the birthrates. They are out-breeding us.”

“Who are?”

“The Muslims. We can’t keep up. The Bekaa will soon be all Shia. We’ll be switching to fruit juice production.”

“Is it possible?”

“It is possible. What if they just said, No more alcohol?”

She opened her hands wide.

After the visit I walked out into the main road of Chtaura, thick with the farm dust of passing tractors and the pickups racing to the Syrian border. The town cowers under jagged peaks that belittle its efforts at homeliness and business. It seems like a menaced desert frontier.

Down the hill were a few
shawarma
restaurants with cars parked outside, loud, family-fun places with ovens and grills. On the way to one of these, I saw a shop where I could buy a can of beer. Since I was parched and could not contemplate opening the two bottles of arak I was carrying, I stepped in, bought the beer, and walked on to the largest of the
shawarma
places, which was called Ikhlass.

I noticed at once that the mood was not entirely normal. It was possible, after all, that my two bottles of arak and can of beer had been spotted at once, even though they were legal. The glass doors were guarded by a small posse of the men in shades whom one learns in this part of the world to give a wide berth to. But now they could not be avoided. I went up to the outdoor grill and got the
shawarma
. The men in shades rotated toward
me, distastefully curious. There was something going on inside the restaurant. It was a prominent Hezbollah cleric in for his lunchtime
shawarma
. The men in shades stared at my beer and I asked the grill master if I could sit inside and drink it with my
shawarma
. Sure, he said. You can drink that stuff if you have to. Since there was nowhere else to go but the street, I went into the restaurant past the scowling guards and sat as far away as I could from the dining cleric. It was, in fact, the staff who appeared most jarred. The men around the cleric, for their part, appeared merely contemptuous. The cleric turned for a moment and looked at me. A conversation, I thought hopefully. But there was no chance of that. Their eyes alighted upon the frothing can of beer, and in them was a sort of hardened pity, as if I and my can did not really exist in this world.

I went to Château Massaya and had lunch with the winemaker Ramzi Ghosn. He insisted that Hezbollah was not a problem. Their people made substantial earnings as vineyard workers, and in the light of this reality the clerics would turn a blind eye. Shiites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future.

“The boys with beards up in the hills, they are the ones who make me sleepless at night. They are the madmen. The Shia are something else.”

“Not true fanatics?”

“Not about these things.”

Halfway through lunch two German tourists arrived. They
were “mobile publishers.” They had just brought out a biography of Khalil Gibran and were sailing around Lebanon by themselves in a minivan filled with their books, which they hoped to sell in towns and villages across the land. They were hearty, sensitive, and sandaled—in short, everything I loathe—but the man with his graying mustache and vivid eyes was a true scholar of Lebanese wine. He could list them all, literally, and then he could provide each name with an instantly recalled tasting note. It was a feat of memory and also of devotion, of love for a culture in which he was, in the end, a superfluous visitor.

“Oh, we love Lebanon,” they kept saying, nodding sadly, as if it were a mystery even to themselves.

They joined us and we drank some of the house Massaya. It was serviceable wine and went well with the lamb chops, the
labneh
, the fresh mint. I was sure that the conversation would now settle into the usual babble of gastronomes and foodies, but as we were about to talk about wine, there was a distant overhead rumble, and Ramzi said, quite laconically, as if the following observation were not even worth making, “It’s the Israeli air force. We are a country that cannot even control its own skies.”

The Germans tutted over Israel.

“You see?” the wine scholar said. “Now you know why Hezbollah has such a following.”

“Between Israel and Hezbollah,” the lady said. “Poor Lebanon.”

Ramzi now rose nationalistically to the occasion.

“We are surrounded by more powerful countries. Yes. But none of them have our joie de vivre, our way of life, our
wine”—he fumbled a little—“our women, our—our—well, our lamb chops. Have you ever eaten a better lamb chop in the Middle East?”

“Never.”

“There is nothing in the Middle East like us. Where else can you drink wine?”

“Israel,” I said.

There were exasperated shrugs.

Did I know, Ramzi continued, that the Bekaa Valley was the northern tip of the Rift Valley that extended all the way to Kenya and was the birthplace of the human race?

“What a dreadful idea,” I said, “that the human race had a birthplace.”

After an apple dessert, to catch the dusk, I made my way a few miles into the valley to the Umayyad ruins of Anjar, a bleak and lonely place at sundown.

The Arab city was abandoned in the eighth century, though no one knows why. The ruins today are encircled by a long wall, outside which lies a shabby village populated with resettled Armenians. The signs are all in Armenian, but the Syrian secret police maintain a heavy presence—they ran Lebanon from this unnoticed backwater for many years. An atmosphere of physical fear oozes from the empty roads, and the elegant, pencil-thin vaults and arches of the Umayyad architects stand in cool isolation.