In November 2014, I was completely lost. The company I worked for was about to be restructured, and I’d been working long days in the office and long nights at events, often finishing off too much leftover wine. Every morning I dragged myself out of bed and barely recognised the puffy face and tired eyes looking back at me in the mirror.
I had spent my whole working life in the wine industry, yet I felt as though I didn’t belong in it at all. My job, as I saw it, was persuading wealthy men to drink more wine, the kind of men who treated you like a waitress however much responsibility you carried. Living alone in London never left me with any money, and I felt as if I was living on scraps from their tables.
At one of those events, a Bordeaux tasting, I’d invited a friend who bought fine wine for a wealthy press baron’s cellar. It’s always good to see a familiar face in a crowd. Partway through the evening, he turned to me with his phone already in his hand.
“Do you want to go to Lebanon?”
By then, the war in Syria had spread like wildfire, and refugees were fleeing across every border. The only Beirut I knew was the one on the news, where reporters filed their stories from a safe distance.
“Yes, definitely.”
On the road to Damascus
Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Beirut with no idea what to expect. Through the gap in the seats in front of me, I could read pages of the book the passenger was holding, Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation.
We landed after sunset and drove out of the city towards the Bekaa Valley. As the lights faded behind us, a road sign pointed to the turn-off for Damascus. I laughed to myself, thinking of all the times I’d described something trivial as a “Damascene moment.” Now here I was on the actual road to Damascus, and if I’m honest, a conversion was exactly what I was hoping for, though I had no idea what needed to change.
“This is us, here,” the driver said, and we tumbled out into dark streets in the middle of a power cut. A small Christmas tree, no bigger than a bonsai Lebanese cedar, twinkled with lights. The first thing we did after dropping our bags was have a glass of wine.
The phone
The next morning, my phone was dead. I’d left it charging overnight, and the power cuts had short-circuited it. That phone was my internet and my camera for the whole trip, and it was fried.
Outside, I could see the mountains around the valley for the first time. We drove to Château Ksara, founded in 1857 by Jesuit monks who inherited a 25-hectare plot between Tanail and Zahlé. On the tour, we learned that the monks had planted Cinsault, Carignan and Grenache brought over from Algeria, laying the foundations for the modern Lebanese wine industry. I took notes with one eye on the room, looking for a socket, while the blank screen of my phone stared back at me.
At lunch, over chicken skewers and roast potatoes, I found myself sitting next to the owner. He noticed I hadn’t touched my food and asked if everything was all right. Then he called one of the waiters over and whispered something in his ear. I was not making a good first impression on anyone.
“Stupid phone,” I muttered under my breath. “There are more important things than you.” I kept turning it on and off, taking it apart and putting it back together, while time ran out before our next winery visit. How was I going to buy a phone in the middle of the Lebanese wine country?
Then the waiter came back from the market and handed me a second-hand Nokia.
“No, I can’t possibly take this!”
“Our gift,” he said.
“No, it’s too much!”
I wanted to give him every penny I had at this stage of the trip, but he refused to take any money. I kept insisting until my insistence began to feel like an insult, so in the end I accepted the gift, humbled.
I had come to Lebanon feeling like I lived on scraps from wealthy men’s tables, and it was a waiter, in a country carrying far heavier burdens than mine, who showed me what generosity looks like.
We finished the visit by greeting the Syrian women picking grapes in the vineyard. They had only recently arrived in Lebanon. We smiled and waved, and they covered their faces with their scarves as they sat down in the shade for lunch.
“I know you will have some great wines in Lebanon,” the owner of Ksara said as he waved us goodbye.
And he was right.
Whenever I taste them now, I think of the generosity I met there, which seems to me as much a part of Lebanese wine as the grapes themselves.
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A note from August 2020: This post was first published after the explosion in Beirut’s port. At the time, readers supported the city through the #BidforBeirut auction, which raised funds for Souk el Tayeb and Tawlet and for Impact Lebanon, and by buying Lebanese wine.
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