Some countries come up so often in the news that you feel you ought to know more about them. There is a painless way to achieve this. Read travel literature. An intelligent travel book provides more enlightenment than any number of newspaper accounts of the latest atrocities, as well as placing in a longer historical perspective lands which (as was once said of Ireland) produce more history than can be consumed locally.
Imagine, then, the pleasure of finding a book about the Near East that is both easy to read and fresh in its perspective. It is William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. The author had the fine idea of travelling clockwise around the Eastern Mediterranean (what we used to call the Levant), starting from the monastic community at Mount Athos in northern Greece and ending among the Copts of Egypt, chronicling the scattered remnants of the Christian commonwealth which once covered the whole Mediterranean world in the three centuries leading up to the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century.
Dalrymple’s visit to a Christian abbey in northern Mesopotamia is particularly poignant. He describes one of the surviving monks, a man whose native tongue is Syriac, a variant of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke, looking out over the monastery’s parched and deserted vineyards. The escarpment of Tur ’Abdin was an area whose wine was well known in Biblical times. Not anymore.
In the Muslim Near East, Christians have traditionally been associated with winemaking. Of course, despite the Koranic prohibitions, they had no monopoly on its consumption. One thinks of the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Sot, and of the poet Omar Khayyam with his book of verses underneath the bough, his loaf of bread and jug of wine, and Thou—even though scholars tell me that the lines would be more accurately translated as a cask of wine, and half a sheep, and Thou. But in common belief, Christianity and wine went together; the Armenian Christians of Ispahan in Persia made rugs with irregularities in the pattern which the dealers called “tipsy carpets.”
Many modern Near Eastern states produce fine wines. The Vieux Thibar of Tunisia is powerful stuff and the multifarious wines of Turkey are a pleasure to the traveller. (My favorite is called Villa Doluca—pronounced do-lud-jah) but they are not frequently found round here. The best known Levantine wine is called Chateau Musar, made for more than 70 years now by a Maronite Christian family in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. The vines grow on gravel and limestone 3,000 feet above sea level, and they are guaranteed a mild climate by protective mountains on either side. This valley is otherwise famous for the ancient temples at Ba’albek, the largest in the Roman world and known in pre-Christian times for its ritual prostitutes (and known today for its warlords).
There is nothing quite like Chateau Musar. It comes in a claret bottle (with shoulders), its maker studied at the University of Bourdeaux (France was the dominant western power here from the mid-19th century onwards), and the grapes are mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, the variety which gives flavor to most Bourdeaux. Yet the taste and character is more like a Rhone—more sunshine, more alcohol. I recently considered a bottle of the 1996 vintage. It was strong yet subtle.
Chateau Musar takes a long time to make. The different varieties of grape (Cabernet, Cinsault, and various others) are fermented separately for two years before they are blended and then left to age for several more years. It also varies in price; I have seen it on the Internet for less than $12 and for more than $20. This is a wine well worth bringing home in your luggage if you take a trip this fall, to lands where it is more readily available—the Levant, Europe, or England. Whether you think it was Noah who invented wine or Dionysius, Chateau Musar will show you how the ancient art of winemaking can be refined to a high elegance.
Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply