🍷 Wine

🍇 A Wine History Older Than the Bible

Syria's relationship with wine predates scripture — Phoenician city-states along this coast were exporting wine to Egypt as early as the second millennium BC, and Damascus appears in ancient texts as a viticultural center around 1500 BC. Byzantine-era monasteries kept the tradition alive for sacramental use through the early Islamic centuries, and under Ottoman rule, Christian communities were specifically permitted to continue producing wine for religious and personal use — a thread that never quite broke, even through thirteen years of war.

What makes this history remarkable isn't just its length. It's that Syria's wine culture survived a civil war that flattened cities, displaced half the population, and cut the country off from the world for over a decade — carried, in the end, by a handful of families who simply refused to stop.

🍷 Domaine de Bargylus — The Wine That Survived a War

Modern Syrian wine is a genuinely small story, and it has one flagship: Domaine de Bargylus, on the slopes of Mount Bargylus above Latakia. Run by the Saadé family — Karim and Sandro, of Orthodox Christian heritage — since 2003, with consulting from Bordeaux's Stéphane Derenoncourt, the estate has been targeted by Islamist rebels during the war and kept producing anyway. Today it turns out around 45,000 bottles a year of Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot-based reds alongside Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc whites.

Critic Jancis Robinson has called it arguably the finest wine of the Eastern Mediterranean — a remarkable claim for a vineyard that has weathered actual shelling. Almost none of it is easy to find inside Syria itself; most of the production is exported, so tasting it often means tracking down a bottle abroad rather than visiting the source.

KWS = Kaufmann World Score, our own 1–10 rating. Production is minuscule by international standards and export-focused — treat sourcing a bottle as part of the adventure. Last updated: August 2026.

💙 The Blue Wine Curiosity

Syria's stranger, lesser-known wine story: a small producer that began in the Christian mountain town of Maaloula, famous for its distinctive blue-tinted wine, before the war forced it to relocate to the quieter countryside near Homs. It remains more curiosity than commercial force — most visitors encounter it through word of mouth rather than a wine list — but as a symbol of continuity through catastrophe, few bottles anywhere carry more weight.