This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
New cork removal devices don’t get me excited the way they used to. Our drawers are brimming with promotional waiters’ friends from wine companies. Nevertheless, I was impressed with one I received following lunch with Tarek Sakr, winemaker at Chateau Musar.
It’s called a butler’s thief and features two prongs rather than a screw, specifically designed for removing delicate old corks. Very snazzy but also an acknowledgment that Musar’s corks haven’t always been up to the job of keeping Lebanon’s greatest wine secure whilst it is maturing.
I remember one friend’s frustration on his fortieth birthday as one by one the corks from his carefully stored 1990s Musars were shredded by the kind of cheap winged corkscrew one finds in student flats.
Chateau Musar needs long ageing. Whilst it’s always nice to drink on release, generally it’s at 20 years when it starts to reveal its true Musar-ness — that blend of exotic spices, maraschino cherry and a seasoning of what would in other wines be considered faults, volatile acidity (VA), i.e. vinegar and a bacterial infection called brettanomyces which in small quantities gives a pleasant gamey taste.
One of the joys or frustrations of Chateau Musar is you never quite know what you are going to get. The red is a blend of roughly equal parts Cabernet Sauvignon with Cinsault and Carignan. In some vintages like 2009 the Cabernet is to the fore, and Musar can taste uncannily Bordelais in its youth.
Gaston Hochar was inspired by Bordeaux when he founded the property in 1930. Ronald Barton from Château Langoa-Barton was an early champion and Sakr, who has been making wine since 1991, trained at Lafite.
He explained that a good rule of thumb is that the odd vintages taste Medocian, but in even years the Southern French varieties take over producing something wild and spicy, like a lower-alcohol Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Then there are the rogue elements, brettanomyces and VA, which can conspire to smother the more subtle flavours. I’ve had three bottles of 1999 in the past six years: one was perfect, two had a distinct though not unpleasant whiff of horse about them. You’re never going to be bored when you open a bottle of Musar, assuming you can get the cork out.
That’s the red, which I am sure most readers have tried. There’s also a white, which if anything is even more idiosyncratic. It’s made from two grapes, Merwah and Obaideh, which at one time were thought to be related to Semillon and Chardonnay, but genetic analysis suggests are indigenous to Lebanon. These are aged in new French oak barrels for six months, bottled and left to mature for six years.
Again, the wines can differ wildly. Over lunch we tried a 2010 which tasted like a much younger white burgundy. In contrast the 2018 was waxy and toasty like a dry Sauternes. There’s also an oak-aged rosé which, as you can imagine, isn’t something you’d knock back by the pool.
For Musar beginners, a good place to start is the “Jeune” range which the famously irascible Serge Hochar described disparagingly as “fruit juice wines”. To be fair to Serge, they were a bit boring but are now well worth trying. They offer a dash of Musar magic at very reasonable prices. The rosé is particularly good.
Serge Hochar, Gaston’s son, who led the company with such style before his tragic death in a swimming accident in 2014, is part of the reason why Musar is, for most people, Lebanese wine. That’s despite Ksara being far older (it was founded by the Jesuits in 1857) and bigger. Serge’s thrilling tales of making wine with Syrian tanks in the vineyard captured the world’s attention in the 1970s. Sadly Musar’s home in the Bekaa valley is scarcely safer today because it’s a Hezbollah stronghold and therefore in Israel’s firing line.
Sakr thinks that war will once again engulf the vineyards. He recalled the 2006 Israeli invasion. At one point he was driving a truck full of freshly-picked grapes, waving a Chateau Musar flag so everyone would know that he wasn’t a combatant, and praying that the IDF wouldn’t strike. Next thing he knew, there was a loud bang and the car skidded off the road. The radiator had burst. Nothing to do with the Israeli army. All the tales of winemaking against the odds, however, wouldn’t mean anything if the wines themselves weren’t so magnificent and long-lived. Almost unbelievably, the winery still has some 1956 reds and 1954 whites for sale.
In the past it was something of a lottery buying old vintages, but now the chateau is running a recorking programme where old bottles are opened, checked, topped up, given a spanking new cork and dipped in wax. This means that older vintages should be much more reliable than in the past. No need for the butler’s thief.
To prove his point Sakr brought out a bottle of 1986 which has been recorked recently. It was probably the finest Musar I’ve had, spicy, rich and redolent of the Levant with its layers of cinnamon and orange peel but not a trace of vinegar or the aroma of horses. Pure Musar heaven.
