The wonder of Lebanese wine

In the Levant, the grape has been cultivated for millennia, some of it used for wine. The hills of Lebanon were — and are — especially fertile, as the Jesuits discovered. The Society of Jesus was the SAS of the Counter-Reformation. Its alumni were famous for intellectual ability and physical courage: scholars and martyrs. They were also notorious for deviousness. Even Catholic monarchs regarded them with suspicion: the latter-day successors of the Templars. But at least Jesuits were not burnt at the stake, merely expelled from a number of countries, including Spain.

The Jesuits believed that in order to convert the world, they had to move effortlessly in sophisticated circles. To that end, they kept a good table, reinforced by a fine cellar. Hence their wine-growing endeavours in Lebanon, at Ksara in the Bekaa valley, which started in 1857. They acquired vines that had been producing sweet wine for sacramental purposes. Bog-standard communion wine would hardly do for the Js. They vastly upgraded the quality. They also discovered underground passages which dated back to Roman times. The Romans may have used some of them as dungeons. Dungeons in Jesuit hands: that might have been an alarming prospect, but the new owners turned them into cellars.

Lebanon: 50 years ago, it could almost have been said that Earth had not anything to show more fair. Beirut was a low-rise Turkish city, in the benign shadow of Mount Lebanon. For much of the year, in the course of the same day, it was possible to swim in the sea and ski in the mountains. The inhabitants were a delightful blend of charm and cunning. As sophisticated as anyone whom the Jesuits had encountered, they practised every known vice with elegance, including the ones which they had invented.