Name: Chateau Oumsiyat Syrah 2018
Type: Red Wine
Grapes: Syrah
Year: 2018
Country: Lebanon
Region: Mount Lebanon
Date Consumed: January 26, 2025
I can imagine emptying a whole bottle by myself on a Friday evening after a long workweek. This is a nice wine to pair with long breaks and full-bodied Nicaraguan cigars. It’s also a nice wine to pair with philosophical texts. I can taste darkness and depth. I can smell pines and petrichor. I can see words sinking in a purple ocean…
Name: Chateau Kefraya Comte de M 2020
Type: Red Wine
Grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah
Year: 2020
Country: Lebanon
Region: Bekaa Valley
Date Consumed: January 2, 2025
One of the best Lebanese wines one can have.
Chateau Kefraya’s Comte de M 2020 is a full-bodied wine with playful tannins, and it comes with notes of black fruits, plum, tobacco, oak, and leather.
The most impressive Comte de M vintage I’ve had is probably 2008, which I’ve paired with a Macanudo cigar back in 2021, but this young 2020 vintage that I’ve tried recently was also quite impressive. (If I had another bottle, however, I’d definitely age it a few years. It’s a wine that deserves to be matured.)
Naturally, the Comte de M is a wine that would pair nicely with red meat, strong cheeses, and charcuterie. But I prefer to add some smokiness to the whole experience and pair it with mild or medium-bodied cigars rather than food. It is how I roll…
Name: Chateau Cana Jardin Secret 2016
Type: Red Wine
Grapes: Sabbaghieh
Year: 2016
Country: Lebanon
Region: Mount Lebanon
Date Consumed: December 16, 2024
A medium-bodied red wine from Mount Lebanon that had stronger tannins than I expected and notes of black cherries, strawberry lollipops, olive oil, tobacco, and leather. (And there was this ferric, rusty aftertaste that I couldn’t understand. Where did it come from?)
Now and then, I swirled the wine to observe the sediment that gave it character. “Some people look much wiser than they are,” I thought. And then I said to myself that Chateau Cana’s Comète Rouge is much better than the Jardin Secret, even though the former is much cheaper than the latter.
Overall, the Jardin Secret is a good wine that could have been better. I’d give it a 72/100.
Bored Absurdist 