Weather and pestilence may play havoc with vineyards from one season to the next, but a winemaker can almost always count on some kind of crop to press into juice.
Not Serge Hochar. He almost had to call off last year's harvest entirely. In 1976 and 1984, he made no wine at all. And there have been more than a few nail-biters in between.
So it goes when you make wine, or try to, in war-torn Lebanon. Mr. Hochar owns Chateau Musar, Lebanon's most famous winery, known for an unusual-tasting $50 red that many connoisseurs believe can age as handsomely as the finest Bordeaux. But he's probably more widely known for his fortitude, an asset that came in handy during last summer's Israeli-Lebanese conflict.
Israel, prompted by the capture of two soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas inside Lebanon, retaliated with showers of missiles and bombs, rocking much of the tiny country, including the Bekaa Valley - the Napa Valley of the Middle East that is home to Chateau Musar and about 20 other wineries.
Roads and businesses serving the vineyards were decimated or shut down. It wasn't until days before harvest that a ceasefire enabled some of the more stalwart, mainly Syrian, grape pickers to return.
As he did during the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Mr. Hochar - hard hat at the ready - stuck it out.
So did his son, Gaston, who now manages the operation.
It's a good thing for Musar aficionados, too, because 2006 - wines from which are now aging peacefully in barrels - is shaping up to be one of Lebanon's, and probably Chateau Musar's, better recent vintages.
The conflict did impinge on Mr. Hochar's movements in one respect, though. Not wanting to be caught abroad in the event of further conflict, he cancelled most foreign business travel for the year, including planned visits to the growing markets of China and Brazil.
The one commitment he did keep was a small and very rare public tasting in Vancouver last month that featured Chateau Musar samples from five decades, held as part of the city's recent Playhouse International Wine Festival.
"I could not postpone my trip to Vancouver," he told me afterward. "It's something I have been looking forward to because in the last couple of years, I have discovered that not many companies in the world have the ability to show such a vertical of wines."
If producing world-class wines in a Muslim-dominated country seems like an especially odd achievement, consider that the Bekaa Valley, which runs parallel to the Mediterranean between Damascus and Beirut, basks in almost 300 days of sunshine a year, ideal for wine grapes, which have been grown in the region for something like 6,000 years. You know that story about the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine? Cana is in the Bekaa.
In fact one might, with justification, suggest Chateau Musar's wines taste more like the oxidized wine that would certainly have been served at that wedding than the squeaky-clean, chemically balanced shirazes in your local liquor store.
At a time when consumers and critics the world over are leaning heavily toward fresh, cuddly-smooth wines, Chateau Musar is a bold anachronism. Mr. Hochar, who happens to be Catholic, candidly concedes that even his young wines "taste old."
There's a good reason. Chateau Musar clings proudly to rustic techniques, most notably by shunning the use of sulphur dioxide, a winery's universal antiseptic and antioxidant. Unpleasant though it may sound, the chemical - generally harmless in small quantities - is the most important additive at all stages of production. Avoid it entirely and your wine is likely to end up tasting prune-like, bitter or vinegary, or all three.
