“This is when it all happens. The harvest time is our playground,” Eddie Chami said, surrounded by vines, as he stood on a mountain slope in Bousit village, wearing a T-shirt and a khaki hat. It was early morning, the best time to harvest fragile grapes. Further ahead, a group of men and women were carefully cutting fruits from vines. “We won’t take these,” Chami pointed to a few low-hanging grapes. “We always leave the small ones for the birds.”
Similar scenes play out across Lebanon each fall. It is a small country but has one of the longest-standing wine-making traditions in the world. The Bible describes it as a place of fragrant wines. And it was here, as is traditionally believed, that Jesus turned water into wine. But
