During harvest season in Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley, the fertile basin that is home to Lebanon's wine industry, farm workers carry grapes to be pressed into a precious liquid.

Lebanon makes about 6 million bottle of wine a year. The country is one of the world's smallest producers: there are a dozen or so commercial producers in Lebanon. Among them, only a few make wines that are internationally renowned.

Winemaking was first developed in the ancient Middle East, and such was the importance of wine making in the Bekaa during classical antiquity, that the Romans built a massive temple in Baalbek to the wine god Bacchus which still stands today. Arabs themselves invented the art of distilling fermented beverages into alcoholic spirits, exported it during the Islamic conquests of the Middle Ages, and practice it still by making arak, a grape based anise flavored drink. Today, the majority owners of Lebanon's two largest wineries are Druze and Sunni Muslims respectively.

Ramzi Ghosn, who along with his older brother Sami, owns Massaya, one of Lebanon's newer winemakers. He said in an interview for CNN, "The whole existence of wine making is a contradiction to most of the preconceived notions people have Lebanon". Ramzi and his brother are part of the generation that left Lebanon during the country's 15-year civil war, and who began returning in the 1990's to rebuild the country with skills they learned in exile. Ramzi had studied marketing in the United States. He founded Massaya in the mid 1990s with his brother and his French partner. He says that wine is a perfect vehicle for changing the perception that Lebanon shelters religious fanaticism and terrorism. "Wine is a message of tolerance and sophistication."