Château Oumsiyat Desir 2021
£9.95
The wine
A medium bodied and fresh red wine showing red berried fruit and a delightfully soft finish. Desir is the estate's everyday red and the most approachable wine in the range.
The blend is unusual in including Tempranillo alongside the French varieties that dominate Lebanese viticulture. Cinsault in particular has a long history here, planted by French growers during the Mandate period of the 1920s and 30s, and it gives the lightness and perfume that keeps a wine from a climate this warm feeling fresh rather than heavy. At 12.5 per cent it is notably moderate for the region.
The producer
Château Oumsiyat
View all Château Oumsiyat winesFour generations of the Bou Sleiman family have made wine in Lebanon. When Joseph Bou Sleiman took over Château Oumsiyat he built a modern winery in the village of Mtein and set about combining local tradition with contemporary technique.
The estate farms 78 hectares at over 1,000 metres in the Bekaa Valley, the high plateau between Mount Lebanon to the west and the Anti-Lebanon range to the east. That altitude is the whole reason viticulture works here: the days are hot and dry, but the nights fall away sharply, and the mountains shelter the valley from Mediterranean humidity. Rainfall is scarce and disease pressure minimal.
Lebanon has one of the longest continuous winemaking histories on earth. The Phoenicians traded wine across the Mediterranean from these shores three thousand years ago, and the Romans built a temple to Bacchus at Baalbek in the Bekaa that still stands. The estate works international varieties alongside the indigenous Merwah and Obeidy, two ancient Lebanese whites grown almost nowhere else.
