(7 Oct 2014) LEADIN:
The grape harvest season is in full swing in Syria and Lebanon where wine makers continue to keep the industry going despite three years of war and the threat from Islamic extremists.
Some work with the sound of bombs going off in the distance. All fear that their vineyard might be part of the next swathe of land seized by the Islamic State.
STORYLINE:
It's grape harvesting season and on the Kefraya wine estate in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon hundreds of Syrian families are picking the berries which will ferment into one of Lebanon's best kept secrets.
Lebanese wineries like Kefraya are producing quality wines despite the odds: conflict, economic instability, and the looming threat of Islamic extremism.
In Syria and Lebanon boutique wineries, mainly run by Christians, have endured despite decades of unrest and the fact that Islam, the majority faith in the region, forbids both the production and consumption of alcohol.
The Lebanese wine industry is concentrated in the eastern Bekaa region, a sweeping plain framed by Syria's mountains that has long been a stronghold of the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement. More recently, the religiously mixed region has come to host hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.
Most of the women here are Syrian refugees who fled from the eastern city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State group's self-styled caliphate. There the punishment for drinking is 100 lashes.
"Yes we have to work fast in order to get our daily wage. �we have to harvest 6000 liras (4 USD) and usually we make up to 18000 (12USD)," says 18-year-old day labourer, Maha.
Mohammed Sayyed is 23 years old. His job is to collect crates of grapes picked by the women, and bring them back to the truck.
"We came here because of poverty. We were starving. They slaughtered people and destroyed everything. I'm from Raqqa," he says.
The Lebanese wine industry has about 47 wineries which rely mostly on local markets and project to produce 8 million bottles of wine this year. Lebanon's sizable Christian community drinks, as do many liberal Muslims, but local sales have declined 10-20 percent this year as part of a larger economic downturn.
"Regarding the Kefraya Estate, 60 percent of production is sold in the Lebanese territory and 40 percent outside. We are obviously affected (by the Syrian crisis). The Lebanese today are not up for going out and spending their evenings in restaurants with the current crisis," says Kefraya's technical director, Fabrice Guiberteau.
Lebanon's wineries have thus far been spared from the conflict in neighboring Syria, but the war is never far off. Sometimes explosions from across the border echo like approaching thunder, and armed men conduct nightly patrols of the nearby village, fearing Islamic State militants might cross the border.
Last month it spilled across the border when militants from Syria briefly overran the border town of Arsal, killing and abducting several police and soldiers. Two were later beheaded by the Islamic State group.
But production continues. In his high-rise office in Beirut, Sandro Saade carefully chews a Merlot grape from his vineyard hundreds of miles away, trying to determine if it is ripe enough to order the start of the harvest.
But Saade is determined to produce world-class wines, and to help preserve a Levantine cosmopolitanism imperiled by decades of war.
German tourist, Anna Legde is one of few that dare visit.
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