Jeune Red 2021, Chateau Musar, Bekaa Valley

A richly fruited wine – the palate bursts with an explosion of red cherries, strawberries, blackberries with a little black pepper and spice with a beautiful soft texture.

In 1930, 20-year-old Gaston Hochar founded Chateau Musar after his travels in Bordeaux and the rich heritage of winemaking in Lebanon. In 1959 Gaston’s son Serge, took on the running of the business, demanding that his father step aside to let him put his new ideas and methods to the test. That decision was pivotal and over the following years Serge achieved his stated aim of making a wine that would be known all over the world. Today, the Hochar family are still proudly at the helm of their iconic business with Serge’s two sons, Gaston and Marc being responsible for the day-to-day and commercial aspects of the winery. The winemaking methodology is, as Serge Hochar always intended, non-interventionist and natural, with ambient yeasts in the fermentation, a bare minimum of sulphur employed, and no fining or filtration of the finished Chateau Musar wine. It is absolutely the intention that every vintage be different, ‘to make wine on the edge’ as Serge put it. This approach leads to wines that to some are infuriatingly inconsistent and to many others beguilingly so. Let’s give the last word on this to Serge, who was decanter Man of the Year in 1984: ‘I once produced a wine that was technically perfect, but it lacked the charms of imperfection.

Musar Jeune Red is fermented in cement-lined vats and bottled a year after harvest and released a year later.