Lebanon - Another excursion & welcoming the new year Lebanese style

Day 11 (Dec 31)

This time, we decided to take a private car. Coincidentally, we met a solo traveller the day before on our Tania tour who was also interested in the places we had planned to visit today. Spot of luck as he was good company and also drove the cost down!

Our first stop was to the Chateau Musar winery. We wanted to erase memories of the horrible commercial Ksara wine tours, but things didn't seem to promising as:

1) It was challenging to find the place because of poor signage and people in the neighborhood didn't even know that Chateau Musar was in the neighborhood, and

2) Once we actually got there, the place looked deserted. A random lady gestured to us so we followed her. Bad mistake. She led us into the refinery through what seemed like construction - loud hammering, rough men wearing hard hats and moving big wood pieces, hosing down of wet and muddy floors... We went up and down several flights of stairs before she determined that she'd brought us to the wrong place. Throughout all of this, not a word was exchanged (incommunicado in English). Stranger and stranger. Wine tours should be refined and even a bit uppity, not so rough like this. Eeps. We had no clue what was going on. Finally, she led us to the right room in a separate smaller office building where we would meet the eccentric Fadia. She was sitting in a room with a group of kids who all looked not more than 20.

Fadia was our guide for the morning. She was dressed in a mismatched, dowdy looking outfit and spoke with a quivering bird-like voice. She spoke so passionately about the wine-making process, absolutely unaware of the occasional questioning glances (everyone else besides us were probably wondering about the loud noises). Once in a while, she seemed to notice the bored looks on some of the kids' faces and stopped to ask if we were ok to proceed. It was a good overview though, if you take a bit of an academic interest towards wine. I enjoyed it although I could barely comprehend her accent.

After her overview on the wine-making process and the different types of wines, we moved on. To my surprise (maybe slight horror), we proceeded into the construction area! That's where our wine tour would take place. No pretty vineyards and peaceful surroundings.

Fighting through the very loud construction noises, she explained about the making of arak (the Lebanese version of ouzo or sambuca) and wine distilling. We went to the basement where the wooden french barrels were kept, and she explained that the vineyards were at the Bekka valley (where Ksara is) - a good 2 hours away. Apparently the owners believe that the movement of the grapes over the distance added a little somethin' to it.

The tour really hit the pit when we stepped into one of those lifts with metal doors that had to be pulled shut. We went deeper underground. The doors opened out into a cellar filled from top to bottom with wine bottles. The wine bottles were covered in thick layers of dust, cobwebs and fossilised spiders. What in the world did we get ourselves into???

It was there that we learnt how seriously Chateau Musar took pride in their "natural" processes. Some of their wines are stored for decades and they do not use preservatives for the corks. The cork had a tendency to get wormed through by little insects, and the hence they keep the cobwebs to allow spiders to thrive and prey on these cork-eating insects. That was just for the more ordinary bottles of winer. You should see pictures of the cellar with the vintage bottles - the doors are thickly CAKED in dust and cobwebs.

Ironically though, this is where I started to get a real appreciation for the Musar wine making process. I think even the group warmed up to Fadia at this point, jokes started to be cracked etc. Doesn't change a thing about the sick appearance of the bottles - dust-covered and even blackened cork for the older ones.

I love fun facts, and this is where I learnt some interesting things. For the Musar wines 50 yrs and older, one must decant it very slowly to aerate all the wine, possibly for a full hour. Otherwise it would taste like it went bad. I also learnt to look at the wine levels of bottles of different ages. Generally, younger wines would be at the "neck" level, while wines 20 year or older might be at the "shoulder" level.

Our wine tour concluded with Shanaz and I buying a bottle of Chateau Musar (their top grade) 2003 for consumption that night. I optimistically bought another similar bottle for the family but the taste didn't turn out so great. Will see how things go if we aerate it sufficiently. Heh heh.

After Musar, we went onward to Byblos. Byblos is a pretty seaside town with (surprise surprise) more ruins. We were hoping for a guide to explain the ruins to us, but he was busy with another group, so we had to fly solo (or trio). We had some meagre explanations from our LP guides and also joined in a Nakhal tour for random bits of explanation!

After, we went to the fish fossil museum/workshop to see fish fossils that were hundreds of millions of years old. We were given explanations on fish fossil excavations by the man himself, Pierre Abi-Saad. Very passionate about his work, he shows us excerpts of articles in major publications like Nat Geo and CNN that have covered his fish fossil collection. I asked for a picture and he said, "Sure, why not" and gave a proud, confident smile.

Our second last stop of the day was the Jeitta grotto - limestone caves with stalagtites and stalacmites. As we walked in the tunnel towards the upper cavern, it was all a bit cheesy how they added a touch of background noise, animal sounds etc, to add to the experience of being in nature. Impressively deep caverns although I was pretty terrified of the dizzying heights. In the lower grotto, we took a short boat ride which was very Phantom of the Opera-ish. Even reminded me of the Little Mermaid scene where they were in the Blue Lagoon - Jeitta grotto added various colored lights underwater for mood lighting.

We were pretty sure our driver wanted to go home early on new year so we obliged. I guess we were already pretty tired anyway. Made a quick stopover at Dog River to see tablets carved into the highway cliffs to mark various events in army history (Lebanese, French, Greek...)

That night, we went to Felix to countdown the New Year, a place with rather over-the-top rococo type of furnishings. New Year's has never been a big thing for me, but was fun to be immersed in the Lebanese way of partying. Ladies all dressed over the top - glitter, ridiculous heels, smouldering make-up. The guys - eh. Food spread was amazing - lobster, paella, lamb shank, but I never ate one bite! :( I was ravenous and couldn't wait for our ridiculously expensive late-night new year's eve dinner, so I had a cheap pasta near our hotel a few hours before - wolfed down every last strand. Ah well. Happy 2011!