Chateau Musar
One of the world's great wines
It must have been towards the end of the classroom-based sessions when I was studying for the WSET diploma, that our excellent tutor (they were all first-rate) decided to test us with a particularly delicious white wine. We knew enough by then to tell her that it was a very good, if not outstanding wine, which, untypically for a white, showed all the signs of ageing potential. We threw all our best words at her: taught, vibrant, mineral (you had to be careful with this last one) but none of us had any idea what it was, or where it was from.
She gave us plenty of time, tolerating numerous obviously incorrect answers as her expression became more and more pained until eventually she cracked. ‘This is one of the world's great wines’, she exclaimed, lobbing us another clue. Still silence. ‘It’s less than a month until your exam’, she continued. Lots of bums shifting uncomfortably on seats. There really isn’t another wine like this produced anywhere in the world. We weren’t getting any more clues, but she continued to make us sweat.
It was a Hunter Valley Semillon, indeed Australia’s finest white wine, and one that has been frequently enjoyed chez Braund ever since. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of this piece, except that I loved the way she used the phrase: one of the world’s great wines.
In the intervening years I’ve learned to identify several more wines that deserve the epithet, and near the top of the list, at least as far as red wine is concerned, is Chateau Musar.
One of the lovely things about Chateau Musar is the look that comes over people’s faces when you ask them to guess the country of origin: most have several rapid fire guesses before capitulating. Not that I blame them, because in much the same way that we students failed to think of Australia as producing one of the world’s great white wines, so few people have any idea that Lebanon produces wine at all, let alone one of the world’s great reds.
The story of Chateau Musar is as remarkable as the survival of Lebanon itself. When I was growing up, the country was rarely out of the news, wracked as it was by 15 years of civil war. In the decades since, the it has struggled for political stability in a region where that resource has always been thin on the ground.
In fact, Chateau Musar pre-dates the establishment of Lebanon as an independent state by 13 years. And while the country still struggles to find it’s political identity, it’s most celebrated wine confidently rubs shoulders with the best in the world.
Musar’s vineyards are to be found at the southern end of the Bekaa Valley, about 30km south-west of the capital Beirut. The valley is also home to the Temple of Bacchus, probably built by the Romans in the 2nd century AD. Bacchus (known more commonly as Dionysus by the ancient Greeks) was worshiped in both cultures as the god of wine-making, among several other decadent pastimes. There are no records indicating why the Bekaa valley was chosen as the site for the temple, but there is evidence that wine was already being produced there. We can assume it was of sufficiently good quality to persuade Emperor Antoninus Pius to build his temple there.
So the area already had a good wine pedigree when a young Lebanese called Gaston Hochar returned from a trip to Bordeaux in 1930 determined to exploit the climate and geology of the Bekaa Valley and try his hand at viticulture. He was politically savvy too: electing to build his winery fully 50km from his his nascent vineyards as a hedge against his fledgling countries border’s being changed on a whim by competing colonial powers, or as the the result of a regional war.
Lebanon’s latitude doesn’t suggest a climate disposed to the production of high quality grapes for wine, but the valley’s 1000 metre elevation means it’s cool enough, while 300 days of sunshine a year explain why the wine exudes a depth and complexity that is only possible from perfectly ripened fruit.
Today, Chateau Musar remains in the hands of the Hochar family: Gaston’s son Serge took over in the 1950s and launched the wine onto the world stage. And now his two sons, Gaston and Marc, are in charge.
The objective has never been to make wines to compete with the great French reds of Bordeaux or the Rhone Valley, rather to make something different, but just as good. Opinion is divided in the wine community about how good Chateau Musar is. But this is, perhaps, inevitable in a market where too often people use a great (usually French) wine from an especially propitious vintage as the benchmark against which all other wines should be assessed.
Musar also finds critics among purists who struggle with the unusual blend of grapes employed: The vineyards are planted with cabernet sauvignon, carignan, cinsault, grenache, syrah, and mourvèdre; six varieties that do well in the unique conditions of the Bekaa Valley. The flagship wine generally comprises the first three of these, in equal quantities, but the blend can vary from year to year, depending on the weather and its impact on the grapes. This often means a quite different wines, though every vintage somehow manages to carry the hallmark of Chateau Musar.
So what other wines does it taste like? Well, none really, because these three grapes are rarely combined outside Lebanon. Cabernet Sauvigon is the principal constituent of left-bank Bordeaux wines, and elsewhere is used to make excellent single-varietals in California and Australia. (I’ll be writing about my favorite Coonawara Cabarnet here soon). Carignan is a staple in the south of France, especially the Languedoc, while Cinsaut features there too, but also makes a key contribution to the excellent rosés of Provence. It’s great claim to fame, though, is as a parent of (along with Pinot Noir) of Pinotage, the relatively new grape which makes such fine reds in South Africa.
If you insist on a comparison, Musar can taste like a fine Pinotage, but it also sometimes reminds me of a very good Côte Rôtie. Now Côte Rôtie has to be at least 80 per cent Syrah, and the only other grape allowed is Viognier. But then why shouldn’t a wine made at a thousand metres above sea level from equal portions of cabernet sauvignon, carignan and cinsault in a valley in the middle-east, not taste similar to a wine made from Syrah and a white grape on the banks of the North Rhone a couple of hundred feet above sea level? While the science of wine making has come on leaps and bounds in recent decades, precisely why certain wines taste the way thy do remains a delicious mystery.
Despite the naysayers, most people are surprised by the ability of Chateau Musar to improve with age. This 2018 Jancis Robinson article with notes on 17 different vintages proves the point mightily. Whereas many wines made with the future in mind can evolve into quite different beasts after twenty or so years of careful storage, Chateau Musar instead seems to add layers to what is already there.
This was certainly the case with the 2008 I opened the other evening. While it was already developing the flavours associated with bottle age: some sweet raspberry jam, a hint of leather and tobacco, the ‘primary’ fruit that would have dominated ten years ago was still well in evidence: blueberries, black cherry and black plum from the carignan; raspberries and redcurrant from the cinsault, alongside vanilla and smokiness from a year ageing in French oak.
Perhaps more than any other producer, it’s always worth downloading the tasting notes from Chateau Musar. As you can see they are not anxious to get their wines to market. The constituent parts of the 2008 were aged separately for three years before bottling, and the wine wasn’t released for a further four. So no danger of drinking a Chateau Musar too early then. Or is there? Jancis Robinson reckons the 2008 could go on improving for another two decades. Happily I have another bottle, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to wait that long.
If you’d like to read more about Chateau Musar, this excellent 2003 piece by Andrew Jefford in Decanter is well worth the time, and I particularly like this quote from the late Serge Hochar, which explains a great deal:
making money is not the prime objective. The prime objective is social: country, roots, genes, history.’
Head over to the Tasting Notes section for more information about this wine, and where you can buy it.