'The grapes won't wait': Lebanese winemakers' future in balance as conflict rages

Their thoughts should be focused on a new vintage. But instead the vineyard owners of the Bekaa Valley are more concerned with where the bombs are going to fall next - and counting the cost, they tell William Christou

- William Christou

In September Elias Maalouf and his father were sitting in Chateau Rayak, the family winery in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, when they decided to head home for a lunch break. Five minutes later an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on a house across the street, crushing the three-storey building and destroying much of the winery.

"If we hadn't left we would have died," said 41-year-old Maalouf, sitting in the winery as repair workers replaced a shattered television five months later. The doors had blown in from the force of the blast and shattered glass had rained down on the table where he now sat.

An hour after the bombing, Maalouf returned to the winery and started repairs. He swept up broken bottles, some of them more than 20 years old, removed a severed foot that landed in front of his storage room and collected broken equipment in his distillery.

"All I could smell was wine. You always enjoy the smell of your own wine, but that day it was the worst smell I could imagine. It was the smell of my loss," he said. Maalouf lost about 40,000 bottles and £158,600 in damages. He had to leave 60 tons of grapes to wither on the vine.

An increase in fighting across the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and Israel started on 8 October 2023, after the Iran-backed group had launched missiles into Israel "in solidarity" with Palestinians following the 7 October Hamas-led attack and the start of Israeli bombing of Gaza, kicking off 13 months of war.

So far, the fighting has left more than 3,900 people dead in Lebanon, displaced more than one million and left parts of the south, the Bekaa valley and the capital, Beirut, in ruins.