‘I’ve got it! Pomegranate!’
Omar Zumot, Jordanian entrepreneur and winemaker, beams across the table, stopping me in mid-sentence. Pomegranate? I take a second to think, and then let another sip of the dark, ruby-red wine swirl around my mouth. He’s right. I close my eyes and allow my taste buds to message my brain. He’s spot on. Pomegranate. It feels like a weight off the shoulders just to be sure.
Wine tasting, as Zumot says, can be painful. He should know: as his country’s premier winemaker, he is on a self-declared mission to put Jordanian wine on the map – and it is often a struggle. Almost 15 years after single-handedly creating Jordan’s first commercial vineyards – and with a respectable range of good-quality wines to his name – he still faces a wall of ignorance, sometimes even mockery, from the wine establishment.
A 2007 story by the news agency AFP epitomises the stance, discussing Arab wine in terms of ‘Château Migraine’. Omar Zumot isn’t laughing. ‘This is my greatest concern,’ he says, ‘the reputation of Jordanian wine’.
Currently meriting barely a paragraph in most wine encyclopedias, Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern wine producers that claim biblical origins for their wine industries. After a gap of a millennium, production began again in the 19th century in Lebanon and Palestine, both influenced by French expertise. With consumption of alcohol forbidden to Muslims, their separate industries were developed in Lebanon by Christians, and in Palestine (later Israel) by Jews. Both countries now dominate the region’s winemaking, Lebanon producing around 150,000 hectolitres annually and Israel almost 60,000.
By contrast, according to figures from the US-based Wine Institute, Jordan accounts for around 5,000 hectolitres. Annual consumption totals just 0.1 litres per capita – compared with 1.1 in Israel or 3.5 in Lebanon – yet that conceals the fact that most Jordanian wine is consumed by non-Jordanians, chiefly tourists.
Zumot’s Grands Vin de Jordanie brand includes the Saint-George range – a Merlot, a Shiraz, a Cabernet Sauvignon reserve, and other blends – alongside a Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc blend labelled Machaerus. They compete with the bright Mount Nebo whites and the varied Jordan River range produced by Eagle, part of the local Haddad group.
Yet for a nation that is 95 per cent Muslim to have a wine industry at all speaks volumes. In Zumot’s words: ‘Jordan is an Islamic country where you can make wine: how much more tolerant could you get?’
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