‘The grapes won’t wait’: Lebanese winemakers fight to survive as war rages

Owners of vineyards in the Bekaa valley are focused more on Israeli air strikes than this year’s vintage. How are these family-run businesses coping?

In September Elias Maalouf and his father were sitting in Chateau Rayak, the family winery in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, when they decided to head home for a lunch break. Five minutes later an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on a house across the street, crushing the three-storey building and destroying much of the winery.

“If we hadn’t left we would have died,” said 41-year-old Maalouf, sitting in the winery as repair workers replaced a shattered television five months later. The doors had blown in from the force of the blast and shattered glass had rained down on the table where he now sat, the wood of the furniture still pockmarked from shrapnel.

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