Warm, spicy and complex, often with an exotic, aged character
Ageing
10–30 years for the legends
Serving
16–18 °C
Wine has been made in the Bekaa since the Phoenicians, and the Roman temple of Bacchus at Baalbek still looms over the valley. On this high, sunlit plateau between two mountain ranges, French colonial ties left Cabernet, Cinsault and Carignan, which make rich, warm, spicy reds — most famously the idiosyncratic, long-lived wines of Château Musar, which kept bottling through the civil war.
Cool at altitude and reliably sunny, the Bekaa endures against every political odd as one of the oldest continuously working wine regions on earth — resilience made liquid, and Lebanon's gift to the wine world.