We're here in London, just off the King's Road, for a closer look at the sectors biggest
export market.
Lebanese wine has a mystique; it's very romantic and when people open a bottle of Lebanese
wine, many of them feel they're uncorking a wine with a whiff of conflict.
For Michael Karam, it's Lebanon’s centuries old tradition of wine making, combined with
the turbulence of the country's recent past, that keeps consumers coming back for more.
It's exciting.
Lebanese wine is very exciting.
And also it hasn’t hurt the fact that Lebanon has still maintained this kind of glamorous
brand equity.
It's in a very turbulent part of the world, but it still managed to have the reputation
of being a party town.
Retailing anywhere from 20 to 40 pounds in London shops, as well as on a growing number
of local wine lists, Lebanese wine is an affordable way to take a taste of the country's cultural
past.
Lebanese wine’s been hitting the shelves in London for about 30 years now.
Chateau Mazhar was discovered, if you want to use that word, at the Bristol wine fair
in 1979 and has been a darling of the UK wine trade ever since.
So it's been around for about 30 years available to consumers.
What has not been around for so long has been the other wines that came out after the 75/90
Civil War when about 12 new producers dusted themselves down from the fighting and took
a look around what was happening in the wine world and said well we're grape farmers, we've
been working grapes generations, we can do some of this; we can get in on the action.
And so in the last 25 years, if you want, there's been a kind of renaissance in Lebanese
wine and the wines have now become a lot more accessible all over the world.
Demand for Lebanese wine is still very small.
We're a very small country we have very small production.
Just to give you an idea of the level of production we make 9 million bottles a year.
That might sound a lot but just across the water there's Cyprus doing 40 million, Israel
to the south does 50 million, Turkey to the north those 70 million.
And even those figures, by global standard, is nothing.
Italy does four billion bottles a year.
If you look at the ranking of the world's top wine producers the country before it stops
naming countries and goes the rest of the world is Brazil.
No one’s really had wine from Brazil, I would venture, and Brazil make 350 million
bottles, so 9 million is tiny.
What's the most difficult part of bringing this product to market?
At home, land is a problem because land is expensive but, if you were to overcome that
land problem, if you if you owned land for example and decided to plant it, the making
of the wine and the bottling of the wine and packaging the wine is in fact quite easy.
The real challenge is selling it.
Now, if you can sell all your wine in the local market, that's fantastic.
A lot of Lebanese wine producers have aspirations to export their wines abroad.
And this is where it becomes quite tricky because, as you said, there are 36 billion
bottles on the shelves out there and we have to try and kind of push through our little
production level and get it to the consumer and say to the consumer 'drink us drink Lebanese wine'.
How do you do that?
You have to sell the idea of Lebanon as a wine producing country before you sell the
idea of the individual wine producers.
If you were to stop someone on the street in the King's Road out here and say 'Chile.
What's the first thing that comes to mind?'
The chances are they would say wine because I mean they probably don't know- they probably
couldn’t name a single Chilean wine producer but they know that Chili makes wine.
If you stop them on the street and you say Lebanon, they're probably going to say guys
with guns, guys with beards, instability, war.
Religious turmoil and so on.
So we need to replace these images in the minds of the consumers with images of mountains
vineyards big guys with big mustaches and huge hands picking vines, families sitting around
the table enjoying that Mediterranean lifestyle.
That is what needs to be done if Lebanon is to really kind of get a toehold in the international market.
It's got to be seen- it's got to be recognized in the consumer's mind as a wine producing
country.
Where can Chateau Musar and other brands like Ixsir hope to go in future?
Well Chateau Musar has always been around long time, it's everywhere.
It's all over the world so you're talking about the rest of the newcomers, if you want.
All these other very exciting new producers that are coming up.
The U.K. is probably the market that is most open to wines from the more exotic countries
or the less known wine producing countries.
So that's a very vibrant market for us.
The U.S. and in particular New York is a market with huge potential.
And Japan again is a market with huge potential.
Why?
Because these markets with very sophisticated wine professionals an very sophisticated
consumers are always on the lookout from- always on the lookout for wines from new countries
with new grapes new expressions and Lebanon fits that bill.