Valleys, Caves, Ruins & Sandwiches of Delight

It's day two in Lebanon and after waiting for a long time for lunch, we almost eat ourselves into a coma. By Kate

Traffic wakes me early. Beirut, it seems, gets by on very little sleep. Today, Sami wants to give us a flavour of Lebanon and is taking us first to some caves and then to the Faara Valley, where they are building a new winery and restaurant. At least, that is the plan in the morning – things are liable to change.

First, we have to get out of Beirut in the morning rush hour. This is a long winded process. Sami thinks that the city in the world closest to this is Manhatten and while they don’t look anything like each other, there is a pulse and an urgency to both.   Not necessarily whilst stuck in traffic, but even stationary, I know what he means.

For a place reduced to rubble by 1991 (and we are driving directly through where the worst of it was), and a country of 17 different sects who generally find it incredibly difficult if not impossible to agree with each other, where the situation is constantly on the razor edge of another descent into, at best, skirmish and at worst, all out war they certainly get things done. The energy radiates, intoxicatingly.

Here, it is boom time. The Saudi’s, Syrians and Iranians all pour in money and there is no hint of the recession blanketing so much of the planet. Everywhere, cranes stand stark against the sky line and buildings rise right next to shells which remain blasted and pock marked with bullets.    It is an intriguing mix of shabby and slick, with the latter having entirely subsumed the former in small pockets.   The power of renewal is palpable.

Beirut is a city of the mountains (see below in the far distance). Indeed, Lebanon is a mountain country – one of the big surprises for me. I suppose I always imagined a flatter, more semi dessert scenario with Bekaa Valley being like an oasis of fertility. Not so. The city extends west ward on a green peninsula, a green and glittering mix of Mediterranean vegetation and buildings – not all beautiful, far from it – which seem to have been poured through the mountains, down to the sea.   Keeping the moisture from the Mediterranean in and the sands of the desert out, it is these exact mountains that have made

Lebanon.

Their impassability made this, for centuries, a place for people fleeing prosecution. The refugees found shelter and protection in the high passes until they eventually made it down to the shining sea from whence they traded extensively. Trade remains the most important economic activity although real estate, particularly in Beirut is becoming increasingly important.

We crawl out of the city, in a line of mainly expensive cars. Eventually, we begin to climb and finally, the high rise flats clinging haphazardly to the mountain sides begin to thin. Sami tells us that anything which remains undeveloped is owned by the church – the biggest land owner in Lebenon – but there is no long stretch of clearly defined countryside before we reach the Caves; a reminder that

Lebanon

is, after all, a relatively tiny and very densely populated country.

Jeita Grotto is now a major tourist attraction and along with throngs from the rest of the Middle East, there are western tourists too. The caves are in the running to be voted one of the new seven wonders of the world and truly are extraordinary; both the upper grottos with their creamy folds of rock, towering stalacmites, fantastically shaped stalactites and vast, echoing caverns; and the lower, under ground river. Clear and still as glass, it winds through small and larger rooms, some with ceilings so low, one has to duck one’s head.

We are in a gondola with an Iranian couple who smile and nod and speak to no English although Sami manages to establish a shared disgust at Ahmadinejad who is due to visit the country next week. The Iranians in the gondola right behind us ululate and clap with delight at the spectacle of the river.

“Arabs” Sami mutters.

Up into the Valley next, to visit the ruins of a Roman temple (below). Right next to this a very nearly completed development of holiday flats stands empty and abandoned; the authorities having, rather belatedly, realised that someone had almost finished an entirely modern building next to a fairly extraordinary, ancient one. Planning permission is, reportedly, a very big problem in Lebanon in that it doesn’t really exist. People merely muddle along and accidents like this one will happen.
ruins at faara valley

This valley is a vaguely eerie place. Somewhere I would want to run to if I ever really needed to run away.   Starkly beautiful with Lebanon winking in the distance, it is dotted with empty apartment blocks, their shuttered windows speaking of abandonment. This is where wealthy Lebanese have second homes and where they come to ski in the winter. Later, we drive through the enclave of the super rich, a suburb higher up the mountains, every house a palace of stone and glass and magnificent grounds.   These too are deserted, the only people we see are the Syrian builders working on brand new, equally lavish places.

Sami makes a decision. Instead of going for lunch, we will drive over the pass to some of their vineyards in the Bekaa Valley, so that we can see the change in terrain for ourselves. It is indeed very dramatic. The verdant growth of Faara valley begins to thin and brown and by the time we are on the pass, it is a lunar landscape. Bald rock and sparse scub in distinctly Autumnal colours; flocks of shaggy sheep and goats and even a wizened shepherd, leaning on his staff.

And there it finally is – the Bekaa valley – a patchwork stretching out in front of us with Syria just over the far mountains (see below).   This is a rich, fertile land growing apricots, cherries and almonds as well as, less conventionally, hashish. We descended partially to a parcel of the Massaya vineyards - Mouvedres and Grenache, both planted on the valley slopes and unirrigated as well as being farmed without chemicals. Here, Ramzi finally joins us. He is the brother who actually makes the wines and looks after the growing of the grapes – an important man to know.

Back in the car and back over the pass, to the site of the new winery/tasting and function centre that the Ghosn brothers (below) are quite literally carving out of a hill their father bought in the 1960’s. That was an amazingly astute move on his part as land in the valley now is hugely expensive and indeed, if they had developed it with property, they could have made a great fortune.

Thankfully, they care much more about great wine and so they are constructing a temple in its honour. Using rock which has been scooped from the hill, the project is just starting to take shape. We watch as a great, square boulder is placed, with infinite care, just so on a nascent wall, under the direction of a foreman. At his signal, two very young men wedge smaller rocks in underneath it and then the lumbering metal head of the digger nuzzles again, as gently as such a hulking implement ever can, shifting it an infinitesimal amount back, forward , back again until it is perfectly square. Thus will the new Massaya temple to Bacchus be built and exactly thus were the ancient structures Lebanon has such a wealth of put together – the lifeblood and sweat of slaves, aided by horses and even elephants doing what the mechanical heads do today.

The beginnings of the terraced vineyards will eventually host Chardonnay vines. Not the most adventurous choice, Sami admits, but then they have very little land on which to plant here and so they have to play it safe, to an extent. He believes that the cooler climate here is exactly right for white varietals and well grown Chardonnay is capable of great things, so this is certainly not depressing news.

The temperature has dropped considerably, with Beirut now entirely invisible behind a swathe of fog. We are covered in dust from the site, cold and not a little bit hungry as it is now almost 4pm and still there has been no lunch. It is definitely time to eat.

The restaurant is not 5 minutes from the winery and although completely deserted, the lure of good food is such that the empty echo of the cavernous room looking out over the valley in no way registers as a bad thing. We wash the dust off our hands and wait. It starts to come. Typical Mezze again but even better than what we had last night. There is a large oval platter of fresh local vegetables, including a giant, pale pink tomato which is eaten with ground Sumak – dark red berries which are dried and give a citrusy, salty kick to food. The particular highlights which are new to me are pickled baby aubergines stuffed with walnuts and peppers and also a thyme and rocket salad. This is one of the nicest things I have eaten for ages. The thyme is a much more tender, slightly less highly scented cousin to the version I am used to - it has the aromatic tang, but less so. The rocket too is different – somehow more citrusssy, almost a bit like sorrel. Together, they are magnificent.

We eat and eat like we haven’t seen food for days rather than hours. Ramzi has bought some older vintages of the Massaya Gold to taste and they are both delicious, even though he makes clear that these were so close to the beginning of their wine making adventure (there first vintage was ’98) that, from the vantage point of a decade on, he feels they barely knew what they were doing.   And of course, his particularly careful, considered and remarkably proficient hand did not officially take the wheel until 2004, so things can and will only get even better.

The 2001 is still remarkably fresh and shows juicy, youthful fruit and a hint of the cumin spice I often find on Massaya wines. The structure has been polished down to a sheen and it is really very pleasurable to drink.

The 2000 is an entirely different beast. While the 01 will go on, this has clearly reached the end of its journey. It is a long way from dead but the fruit is starting to raison. Mind you, there is a rich, chocolaty element balancing the spice which means that it is also lovely to drink. Right now. Which is exactly what we do.

We continue, gamely, to eat as food keeps coming. There are quite a few meaty, sausage things but I have more than enough to keep me going. We are all as full as it is possible to be, but like the Bacchanalian Romans who cavorted in the ruins just down the road, it is too much of an orgy of pleasure to stop. Eventually though, there is only so much we can physically do and one by one, our forks fall idle. At that point, Sami informs us that we have to move and it is then that I notice that the table to the right of us has been laden (and never was the word more aptly used) with more food.

This, apparently, is the dessert table. The abandoning of the remains of one course for the pristine napery and piled plates of another is common practise here. We waddle purposefully over and sit down.

There is a variety of fruit – melons, grapes, apples and the best figs I have ever eaten. Small and intensely figgy, I manage far more than I would have thought possible mere minutes earlier. There was more though – very fresh goats curd cheese drizzled with wild honey (I don’t have the words for how good that was), a selection of home made jams (the fig and the pumpkin were both delicious) and Turkish delight. Ramzi insisted on making me something very special with the latter. He took two sweet biscuits (of the rich tea variety) and then carefully sliced a square of Turkish delight in half and proceed to massage it between the biscuits until he had a kind of sandwich. Of Delight.

Only I was not hopeful and as I watched him do it, wondered how I was going to be able to politely dispose of it after taking an obligatory nibble. Turkish delight between tea biscuits? What kind of insane idea is that? Particularly after eating my own body weight in other food.

   Reader, I ate the whole damn thing. With the greatest of ease. It was completely delicious although it was the very final, absolutely-no-going-back-under-any-circumstances straw. I think I could actually feel the food starting to rise up to meet my windpipe at that point. It was definitely time to stop.

Apr May 2012 Jun

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Valleys, Caves, Ruins & Sandwiches of Delight

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