Lebanon

Lebanon, one of the oldest sites of wine production, incorporating some of the ancient eastern Mediterranean land of canaan and, subsequently, most of phoenicia, whose people were arguably the first to treat wine as a tradable commodity (see origins of viniculture). In Baalbek, the ancient Greek city in the Bekaa Valley which is the vine-growing centre of Lebanon, is the temple of bacchus, built in the middle of the 2nd century ad and excavated, displaying much of its former glory, in the early 20th century.