He takes me to one of his three vineyards, at Sama as-Sarhan, northeast of Amman on the Syrian border. This is frontier land – dry, bleak and windblown. To the east yawns an open wilderness of stony desert, while to the north looms the bulk of Syria’s Jabal ad-Duruz, an extinct volcano that – at some point in antiquity – spewed fields of basaltic lava over this landscape. It is a most unlikely place to see vineyards.
i’This is the last parcel of pre-desert land,’ Zumot says. ‘We chose it partly for the soil – it’s basalt. While digging I noticed a new layer every half-metre. I thought it would be good to bring a mineral flavour to the Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc grapes, and we’ve had amazing results.’
As we stroll between the vines, Zumot, 43, explains his background. Born in Amman into an old Christian family from Jerusalem – his father, Bulos, founded the Zumot company in 1954 and is still working today, at the age of 79 – Omar started training in accountancy at 14. In 1988 he spotted a gap in the market and began exporting gin and arak (a local aniseed spirit) to Iraq, and made his first million within a year. When the Iraqi market crashed under sanctions in the mid-1990s, he launched a foodstuffs enterprise – chiefly importing and distributing potato crisps – which remains the mainstay of his business. But he has returned to his first love.
‘I always wanted to be involved with wine. At 19 I went to France to study winemaking at a monastery in the Ardèche – but I was young and stupid, and I spent years procrastinating. Then, in 1996, I started planting.’
I ask what his philosophy is on winemaking. ‘You can’t make money selling wine in Jordan,’ he says. ‘This is not a business; it’s my passion. And I try not to intervene as much as possible. My whole operation is fertiliser-free and pesticide-free. I was advised to spray against grape worm, but the birds steal the worms for me. They charge me – we lose 15 per cent of the grapes to the birds – but this is nature.’
He shows me a large fishpond. ‘I irrigate from here. It’s fed by a renewable aquifer from under the mountain, and the carp manure adds nitrate to the water. I allow sheep into the vineyards to trim dead shoots from the Merlot vines: they eat the weeds, fertilise the soil and their saliva disinfects the vine trunks. My secret is really to produce as little as possible from each vine. We are yielding less than two tonnes of grapes per hectare [compared to a world average of 8.5].’
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