Civil War + Chateau Musar's Fight for Survival

On a good day, the ride from the Chateau Musar office in Achrafiyeh in the centre of Beirut to the airport might take 15 minutes. But good days were rare in 1975. That August, there was peace in the Beka’a Valley but fighting had broken out in downtown Beirut. The Musar wine press had broken down just before the harvest, and the replacement part was sitting over at the airport. Without it, there would be no wine.

Serge set off in his car and remembers, “it was a beautiful day and, en route, I noticed that outside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps there was a militia checkpoint. We called these “barrages de mort”, killing barricades. If you had a name like mine, they’d kill you – finished.” Serge didn’t slow down. He didn’t speed up either. He just drove straight through the checkpoint while the militias were busy dragging other motorists out of their cars and executing them.

“I carried on to the airport, picked up the machine part and sat quietly by myself for 15 minutes. I thought, I know my faith. This is not a religious thing. But it is the same faith I have in my wines. So, I got back in the car. By the time I drove past Sabra and Chatila, the checkpoint had disappeared.”

Serge’s wife had an even closer brush with militants in Beirut but similarly lived to tell the tale. The Civil War had begun.

30,000 Syrian troops move into Lebanon ostensibly to restore peace, but in reality, this was Syria’s attempt to claim the lands (including the Beka’a Valley) it believes it was owed when Lebanon became independent in 1943.

“In 1976 there was total war in Lebanon. We had no electricity. No fuel. No transport. No harvest. No nothing. 1976 was the only year in which we failed to make any wine. For others, the weather is a problem – for us, it is war.”

Without the ability to reach the grapes, to pick them and bring them back to the winery, there could be no new wine. Even if there had been, there was nobody to buy it. So Serge saw the opportunity to reach out and find new markets for the wines he had in his cellars. His father-in-law had a travel-agency in London and agreed to start importing his wines in the UK.

From 1977 to 1990 (and during plenty of small dirty wars since) the Hochar family successfully made wine each year – often plucking grapes from the barbed wire zones of the frontline. “During times of war, we have to put all our belief and all our assets in wine!” said Serge. “We have to keep going with the things that are our essence. By now, I was used to war. So I kept on making wine; I was making it for a market I did not yet know existed.”

The UN steps in with peacekeeping troops and Israel is forced to withdraw from Lebanon. Syria steps in instead, targeting the Christian population in the ‘Hundred Days’ War’, the worst offensive for two years.

Serge: “There was very heavy shelling in Beirut. The Syrians shelled Achrafiyeh, where our office is [in central Beirut]. At the time, my wife Tania was running the Godiva chocolatier nearby. She took the kids to the winery cellar in Ghazir in shock. There were many dead in Achrafiyeh. My secretary hid in the strong metal filing cabinet. Many people here were psychologically affected.”

Revolution in Iran leads to radicalisation of the Shi'ite movement in Lebanon, and the creation of the Amal party, the ‘movement of the dispossessed’.

Bashir Gemayal unites Lebanon’s Christian military factions, creating the Lebanese Forces political party.

Serge: “This was one of the worst years of the war for us. I used to write a harvest report, but have mislaid it for this year.”

Chateau Musar UK was officially established this year.

Relations between Syria and Israel deteriorate.

Serge: “This was a year of terrible hardship. Tania and the kids left for London. They had to. I could not guarantee their safety. They came back, then left again in 1983. I promised that I would join them the moment the war ended. We did see each other every few months when I could get a flight.”

Israel invades Lebanon again intending to dislodge the PLO. Some 18,000 people, mostly civilians, lose their lives as the battle-zone moves towards Beirut. Italian, French and US troops assist in the evacuation of the Palestinians.

In the Beka’a, 80 hectares of Musar vineyards become the frontline between the Syrians and Israelis, whose tanks faced each other over the vines. Serge calculates that he will not be able to harvest grapes from them again until 1985. But he does. In the confusion that ensues after the invasion, the loyal Bedouin pickers collect what fruit they can, and the Hochar trucks manage to make their way to the winery.

Serge: “The 1982 is a pure wine of war.”

Times darken further as suicide bombing reprisals shock Beirut and its suburbs. In the Chouf mountains, the Mountain War begins. That summer, Serge took his family on holiday to the US. During a stop-over in Paris on their return journey, war broke out again so the family decided to settle in France.

Winter is severe in the Beka’a, with metres of snow coating the vineyards; summer is barely warmer, and the Hochars’ harvest was late. A break in fighting, instilled by the American fleet anchored off Beirut, came at just the right time for the vineyard manager to pick a few grape bunches and smuggle them into Beirut for Ronald to check. They were good: there had been no rain, no heatwave, and the grapes had reached perfect condition.

Ronald put in a call to Serge, who was visiting the US, and the brothers decided to match the bravery of their vineyard manager and order the harvest in. “It was very dangerous,” admits Ronald: “Serge flew to Cyprus, then took a six-hour hovercraft crossing to Beirut; he arrived at the winery in Ghazir moments after two rockets blasted the coast road he’d just been driving on.” The truck drivers, with their precious loads of hand-cut grapes, carefully negotiated the capillary-like country roads that would lead them to the winery, relying on a network of local gossip to learn which roads the militias were controlling with checkpoints and which route between the Beka’a and Ghazir would be the least bloody. They were successful. As Ronald said, there were two advantages: “Our usual headache, the traffic jams, were gone. And the harvest, just like that of 1982, was excellent!”

The Lebanese Forces, having controlled the capital since 1982, are expelled, and the Amal Party takes control of West Beirut. Peacekeeping forces (from the US, Italy and the UK) leave Lebanon.

Serge: “We did our best with what we have, as always. This is the Lebanese way. You give me grapes, and my job is only to help them to be the best wine they can be. In 1984 the sun was very hot, and the fighting was hotter. After waiting and waiting for a break in the shelling, and more than a month after the last day of the harvest should have been, we quickly picked whatever grapes were left on the vines. Most were very ripe and sugary. There were enough grapes for only two truckloads, and only two of our drivers were brave enough to attempt the journey to Ghazir. 

The first truck managed to find a way through the cedar forests in the northern Beka’a and get eventually to Tripoli, near the northern border with Syria. In five days it was with us. The second truck drove south over mountain tracks to Jezzine, then crossed the battlefronts on the way down to Sidon. From there, the trucks needed to avoid Beirut, so they waited for a boat. There was a terrible storm, which delayed the ferry to Jounieh. Eventually, the storm was quiet enough and the ferry sailed slowly up the coast. The trucks arrived at the winery after seven days, on October 20th, 45 days after what should have been the end of the harvest – 45! So, in 1984 the grapes that we received were hot, bruised, sticky and very much fermenting. As an act of defiance, and as an act of faith, as a way of showing that the Lebanese spirit can never be broken, we made those grapes into wine. I made the 1984 to declare war against war.”

Fittingly, 1984 was the year that Serge Hochar was named as the first ever Decanter magazine ‘Man of the Year’ - for his unswerving commitment to winemaking.

The Israelis continue their withdrawal from the south of Lebanon under armed pressure from Hezbollah. They keep an occupied ‘security zone’ along their border. In the War of the Camps, Palestinian refugee camps are targeted by Shi'ite and Amal militia.

Serge: “The Israelis continued to withdraw from Sidon, but it was still difficult to get the grapes from the Beka’a to the winery. After this year, things started to settle down, on our terms.”

Serge: “Military action destroyed some of the vineyards on Mount Lebanon. Our white grape Obaideh was, and is, grown on the slopes of the Anti-Lebanon and was still available – but we only ever used this grape for Arak (Lebanon’s aniseed-flavoured aperitif). Prior to 1986, the Chateau white was only produced from Merwah grapes. From 1986 we began to blend Obaideh with Merwah and the combination worked. We were the first to use these two local varieties in a unique new style of wine.”

Close to four decades later, Musar is still the only one.

Anger at the continued presence of Israel in Lebanon is augmented by the first Intifada (Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).

Following Amin Gemayel, Lebanon’s new interim president is announced as Michel Aoun.

Serge: “Life in Lebanon was not so hectic in 1988. It was a normal year, politically speaking.”

President Aoun declares war on Syria. After seven months of fighting, with 800 dead, the Arab League negotiates a ceasefire. The Taif Agreement is signed, with the ethos ‘no victor and no vanquished’, in an attempt to end the Lebanese Civil War. Meanwhile, life is beginning to return to normal in the Hochar vineyards. In an impressive vintage, Carignan grapes begin to win Serge’s heart.

The terms of the Taif agreement are legalised, with reforms including a larger parliamentary assembly, an even Christian to Muslim ratio and reduced power for the presidency.

The final Syrian offensive on October 13th forces President Aoun into exile, and a new unified government under President Elias Hrawi begins the delicate job of piecing Lebanon back together.

Serge: “We were told that the war had ended, but my nose said there were problems. We usually started to harvest our red grapes at around September 15th, but I was afraid of the situation as the Syrians were threatening General Aoun in Lebanon. So, we started harvesting on September 5th. Lucky we did, as 20 days later the Syrians attacked and blocked all the roads. We had finished harvesting the day before.”

In 1990, with peace in the air, the EU asked for evidence that Lebanon was a ‘wine producing country’ in order for Chateau Musar to be able to officially export. EU bureaucrats seem to have been oblivious to the hard fact that Lebanon had produced wine for 6,000 years! This EU directive required a law to be passed in Lebanon giving winemaking the status of an officially sanctioned business – a sensitive subject given that the Minister of Agriculture was a Hezbollah member of the Shi’a community. But the law was passed, and Serge became Lebanon’s delegate to the OIV (Office International de la Vigne et du Vin).