Makers of world s most dangerous wine spend Christmas picking up the pieces from Beirut blast
For the Saadé family of wine war experts , grape picking in Syria was bad enough then came the Beirut blast, political crisis and Covid
1 January 2021 • 1:05pm
The Saadé family offices were a mere half a mile from the Beirut blast
Credit: ANWAR AMRO/AFP
Making the world s most dangerous wine in Syria at a time of war and growing grapes in a neighbouring Lebanon wracked by political and economic crises was tough enough.
But add to that the worst blast since Hiroshima and the Covid pandemic and it is nothing short of a miracle that the Saadés family still managed to harvest and bottle wines in Syria and Lebanon s Beqaa valley this year.
In Lebanese Wine, Perseverance Is Part of the Terroir
When an explosion devastated Beirut, shattering the offices of the Saadé family s wine firm, a father and two sons took it as another challenge to overcome Beirut s port was devastated by the blast, which was equivalent to a 3.3 magnitude earthquake. (AFP via Getty Images) By Dec 9, 2020
On Aug. 4, just after 6 p.m., Johnny Saadé and his sons Sandro and Karim were meeting in his office on the eighth floor of a building on Pasteur Street in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood of Beirut. The family of vintners owns two wine estates the 148-acre Chateau Marsyas in Lebanon s Beqaa Valley and the 30-acre Bargylus in Syria but their business and management offices sit less than a half-mile from the port of Beirut. From their