Bordeaux is a useful comparison in that Chateau Musar’s founder, Gaston Hochar, was of French descent and studied winemaking in Bordeaux. His son, Serge, who died at age 75 in 2014, also studied in Bordeaux, under famed enologist Emile Peynaud. And yes, Musar utilizes Cabernet Sauvignon to create sinewy, long-lived reds. But the comparison ends there: Chateau Musar is really unlike anything else. Grown in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, near its eastern border with Syria, and vinified just outside Beirut, Musar wines aren’t just a good story – what’s in the bottle is for real.

Of course, there was Lebanese made wine during ancient times, but viticulture had been all been abandoned when Gaston Hochar established Musar in 1930. His first good customers were French soldiers (France occupied Lebanon at that time), but the wines didn’t really catch on internationally until the late 1970s –at which point Lebanon has begun what would be a decades-long civil war. Somehow they continued to produce wine throughout the conflict, literally trucking their grapes through war zones and, occasionally, using their cellar as a bomb shelter.

Serge Hochar, who originally took over the winemaking in 1959, was widely known and loved in the wine community for his charm and his philosophical bent – given what he went through to make wine, he was entitled to his cryptic pronouncements. He was a ‘natural’ winemaker before that was a thing (he employed ambient, native yeasts for fermentations and minimized the use of sulfur), and he was also inclined to hold wines in his cellar for many years before releasing them. As he once quipped to the British wine writer Andrew Jefford, “The value of our stock is ten times our annual sales.”

This 2008 is an example of Hochar’s willingness to effectively age the wine for you before selling it to you (something we see at many of the great Rioja bodegas as well). First released in the Spring of 2015, it is a blend of one-third each Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault, and Carignan, grown in gravelly soils at more than 900 meters elevation. These elevations (the white grapes are planted even higher) temper the otherwise arid Mediterranean climate of the Bekaa Valley, and while the wine is powerful, it’s not overblown or jammy. It spent just one year in French oak, then another in cement tanks, before being bottled and held until its release.

Musar’s reds can vary in composition from vintage to vintage (there are a multitude of other red grapes planted on the estate’s 300 acres, many of which find their way into the blend), and like so many wines, they reflect the personality of their maker: in this case both rugged and refined. The cedary, cigar box notes get you thinking about Cabernet and Bordeaux, but then you get a healthy dose of spice and floral aromas from the Cinsault, and you’re pulled back to the Mediterranean. The Carignan lends muscle and funk, but the overall structure is lean, not chunky. With 7-plus years of bottle age under its belt, its aromatics have blossomed well beyond primary fruit into something savory and seductive. Decant this wine about an hour before consuming, bringing it up to about 65 degrees, and serve it in large Bordeaux stems. There’s lots of spicy, earthy notes but also an elegance you don’t want to overpower; try it alongside some herb-crusted lamb chops or just sip it, slowly, on its own.