1998 | Chateau Musar | Bekaa Valley Red

Red Wine: 1998 | Chateau Musar | Bekaa Valley Red

This vintage has a deep crimson colour, a lovely black fruits nose with liquorice, mint and black olives.

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Producer: Chateau Musar

Ratings: WA | 90 D | 94

Vintage: 1998

Size: 750ml

ABV: 13.5%

Varietal: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault

Country/Region: Lebanon, Bekaa Valley

This vintage has a deep crimson colour, a lovely black fruits nose with liquorice, mint and black olives. A good concentration of black cherry and blackberry fruit on the palate balanced with fresh acidity, soft tannins and a long after-taste of morello cherries and clove

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: The 1998 Chateau Musar is a rather prototypical Musar lots of acidity, some brett, fine structure. It reveals a more gentle style on opening, but aeration proves how much underlying power it actually has. (That is, a lot.) There is a good analogy here to the 1994, concerning both how they showed early on and later. There is plenty of power, tannin and acidity, but there is also some balance. I loved the silky texture, emphasized in this vintage. It finishes with a controlled bang. This greatly benefitted from some air, showing layers that I did not initially think it had, but it does seem a bit on the lighter side.

• Decanter: A rollercoaster of a wine over the week of tasting; very difficult to judge. At the first taste it seems quite developed even over the hill but it was nicely built on the palate: 90 points. Then it improves slowly, retaining those autumn leaves and leathery aromas but developing a most sensual texture on the palate and a complex finish: 93 points. After four days, it reached its first summit that of a developed Musar; lovely. Then it went down again, only to resurge after a week, with a very complex expression of almonds, hazelnuts, dates and figs: gorgeous!

Producer Information

Chateau Musar is a renowned wine producer based in Ghazir, Lebanon, just north of the capital Beirut, producing a range of wines from vineyards in the Bekaa Valley, and best-known for its eponymous grand vin: Chateau Musar. Gaston Hochar set up the vinery after traveling through Bordeaux, and today the old vineyards are planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsaut, Carignan and indigenous Lebanese grapes Obaideh and Merwah. In 1959, Hochar’s son Serge took control of the vineyards, having returned from Bordeaux where he was studying enology. The vineyard suffered during the Lebanese Civil War (two vintages were lost or damaged), and Hochar began to look beyond the domestic market. The wine began to gain recognition after Michael Broadbent MW wrote about it in Decanter magazine in 1979 and by the time the war ended in 1990 just a small fraction of Chateau Musar’s production was sold locally. Musar’s flagship red wine, made from a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cinsaut, is the most important wine made in Lebanon. It is fermented in concrete, aged for one year in French oak and then rested in the Musar cellars for at least three years before release sometimes many more. It is famous for its great (intentional) vintage variation, and is highly collectable. In its top tier, Chateau Musar also makes a small amount of white wine from Obaideh and Merwah (thought to be related respectively to Chardonnay and Semillon) from high-altitude vineyards in the Bekaa Valley. These are aged in oak barrel, and like the red wine, spend time in bottle before being released.