Grapes of change

Deir El Ahmar, a Christian village in the northern Bekaa valley’s Hermel-Baalbek region, is more notorious for its marijuana plantations than it is for great wines. But winemaking is precisely what the Coteaux d’Heliopolis Cooperative now wants their village to become known for. The birth of the Cooperative Having never really felt the government’s support or presence, planting hemp was just “the way things have always been done in Deir El Ahmar”, explains Charbel El Fakhri, the legal representative of the Cooperative and the son of its current president. It was also among the few choices of livelihood in the region: “Before it was either planting tobacco or weed or you leave the village because there is nothing else to do, and if you didn’t find a seller [for the weed], it would be a disaster,” recounts Fakhri. Since marijuana is illegal in Lebanon, profits from its sales were inconsistent