Soapbox: Michael Karam on wine’s political power

By Michael Karam

Published: 10 December, 2024

Wine’s ability to deliver a humane face amidst even the most troubled of territories should not be underestimated, as Lebanese-born Michael Karam highlights.

The late Serge Hochar of Chateau Musar was one of my heroes. Not only because he made great wine with an almost spiritual zeal, but because this wine came from a country whose only talking point when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s was the dreary menu of Middle East mayhem. His wine shifted the narrative.

I discovered Chateau Musar in an indie on the Old Brompton Road in 1988. I was going to a dinner party and was cluelessly scanning the shelves, before landing on a lonely bottle near the bottom which bore the legend Vin Du Liban.

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“F*ck me!” I thought “We make wine!” This, to a 21-year-old Lebanese who had been born and brought up in mildly xenophobic England and who, to his shame, while not hiding his roots didn’t exactly trumpet them, offered a sense of pride where there had previously been none.

Seven quid was more than double my budget but I bought a bottle. The dinner was with my then girlfriend’s parents. Her father was of a certain generation and class and looked at me as if I was going to sell his daughter into slavery, while her mother would take her aside and whisper: “He’s very nice but we don’t know anything about him.” Lebanese wine was going to be my weapon of choice in the ongoing, low-level PR war.

It’s reasonable to assume there is a Chilean, Argentinian, South African and Georgian version of my younger self for whom wine has helped ease the memory of death squads, Apartheid and the grinding greyness of Soviet rule. Wine – and other cultural and touristic assets – is a tool, if not necessarily to heal, but at least help present a kinder, more human face of countries that have had tricky pasts.

Maybe ‘tricky’ is putting it mildly. South Africa was a pariah (Israel take note) subject to political, economic, cultural sanctions; shunned by the sporting world; banned from the Olympic Games for 24 years. On Top of the Pops in 1984, The Special AKA urged President Viljoen to Free Nelson Mandela. That’s all gone. Images of angry sjambok-wielding riot police have been replaced by rolling vineyards of Chenin Blanc.

In Chile, between 1982 and 1990, the dictatorship murdered some 3,000 people. In Argentina, over a similar period, the junta’s death squads killed many thousands of dissidents, writers, journalists, left-wing activists and other undesirables. Now it’s the Andes, steaks the size of breeze blocks and lashings of Malbec. Even in plucky little Georgia, with martial Russia posturing on its doorstep, one could argue that the quirky qvevri wine which can be found on London’s more thoughtful lists, has kept the country on our mental radars as it struggles to avoid being again sucked into Russia’s orbit.

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Harvesting rewards

But it’s not just countries with murky pasts that are harvesting the rewards. New Zealand, Australia and the US, hardly hell holes, have all been scrubbed up in one way or another, by their wine industries. Australian sparklers by Mumm and Chandon are taken seriously in a country once the preserve of sexist men surrounded by beer cans. New Zealand was a cultural backwater where the Royal family were scheduled to ride out a nuclear attack. Otago Pinot Noir anyone?

But back to Lebanon, which, as I write, is being bombed daily by the IDF and wine has come to the rescue. It is no coincidence the press has focused on its ‘plucky’ and ‘resilient’ winemakers, who live in the shadow of Israeli drones; the constant threat of random, and not so random, airstrikes. Surely this is proof, if any were needed, that in the past 20 years, Lebanon has established itself as a bona fide winemaking nation.

Wine must be one of the tools Lebanon wields to deliver more of the feel-good factor. It is Lebanon’s most high-profile export, with many assets: the Bekaa Valley with the temple of Bacchus in Baalbek; Byblos from where the Phoenician triremes, laden with amphorae of Bybline, set out to sell to wealthy Romans and Greeks; the mountains with high-altitude wines, the diversity of styles and varieties, a rich Francophone culture, and Beirut with its whiff of louche glamour that decades of war have not shifted. Throw in Lebanon’s fabled cuisine, sense of hospitality, tradition and generosity of spirit, and you have a combination of culture, civilization and conviviality.

Wines of Lebanon: The Journey Continues by Michael Karam (photographs by Norbert Schiller) will be published when the war ends.

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