By selecting grapes from several regions, Ixsir looks to marry a variety of tastes and
really create something new.
These now five years old, this year is a very good crop.
We’ve had fantastic weather, good winter.
And you can see the grapes and the fruit going all over.
So we expect a really good year this year.
And by combining their wine-making, aging and bottling into one eco-friendly facility,
Ixsir offers visitors the experience of a working winery alongside an award winning
restaurant and events facility.
For the founders, it's a natural growth of what Lebanon has to offer.
This house is as it was 300 years ago.
You know, it was only a weekend house because the owners would only come over the weekend
to see the people and their farmers.
And collect the dime to pay to the Turks, the Ottomans.
And part of the front part of the house was the noble part you can see the arcade and
they used to spend the night here and the back part of the house was for the servants
and for the cattle.
And this is what you've developed into a winery.
People come and take lunch, see the winery, enjoy the space.
Yes, actually going- going to the new world.
They have developed hospitality into the wineries you know architecture and hospitality, we’re
the newcomers.
The old French and Italian Chateaus were closed houses where the owners will live or come
over the weekend but nobody else came in or never opened their house to guests or to anybody
which has changed now.
So we thought we should do the same; we are a hospitable country.
So we do our winery here and we're going to develop that eco-tourism around because people
love it when they come over something unique.
And in an industry that relies heavily on imports, from the wooden barrels used for
storing the wine to the corks themselves, even the wine makers usually originate elsewhere.
For Gabby Rivero It was the opportunity to try new techniques and build on a wine-making
culture that goes back thousands of years.
And speaking of drinking, we decided
to find out just what all the fuss was about.
We’ve got to my favorite part which is the tasting.
Tell me a little bit about the wine we're going to taste.
We have here the 2014, which was harvested in September or October of 2014, sat in the
steel tanks that we saw upstairs for three months.
And then was brought down by gravity through the walls, the piping, to these French oak
barrels where it will sit for at least two years so that it ages and a takes the full
taste that our best wine should have.
It's going to wrap your whole mouth with- they are going to be quite strong because
of the aging process.
But you can see that this red fruit.
Tastes of berries.
Talk about a liquid investment it doesn't get much more liquid than this.