Château Oumsiyat Merwah 2025
£10.75
The wine
Made from the indigenous Lebanese variety Merwah, this unique wine delights with notes of elderflower, grapefruit and lemon-soaked rock salt. Fresh, with wonderful tension on the palate, this is a prickly, appetising, salty-spray wine with a gingery bite on the finish.
Merwah is one of only two indigenous white grapes still grown in Lebanon, and it is thought to be related to Semillon. It survives largely because it was traditionally used for arak, the aniseed spirit, and it is grown almost nowhere else on earth. Wines like this are the reason it has a future as a table wine.
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.
