PRINCE OF WINE -WALID ROMAYA
I was born in Baghdad , Modern Iraq, part of ancient Mesopotamia, where evidence of winemaking have been traced thousands of years B.C., to some of the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations.
At age 13, I bought an English book in a downtown Baghdad store about how to make 500 kinds of wine at home. So I came back from school and plonked the book on father’s lap and said “ make some wine’. To his credit, he took up the challenge so as not to disappoint me, or so I would like to think! The better reason maybe he was excited about drinking something other than the de riguer drink of Iraq, Arak (similar to Greek Ouzo).
In Iraq, there were no wineries, however, Christian monks in the north of Iraq had been elaborating wines for local consumption as well as religious services. There was a small fruit and vegetable stall at the end of our street and the vendor had access to vines from the mountainous north of Iraq. After a classic bazaar style haggling with the vendor about the price of grapes per kilo, father emerged victorious with boxes of grapes, and soon we had all sort of wine making paraphernalia such as plastic buckets, glass containers and siphoning equipment. My three older brothers helped in the adventure, and many good fruity, sweet wines were made from grapes, apples pears and whatever fruit that contained sugar that would be attacked by yeast to make alcohol and CO2! My interest in wine at 13 soon faded in direct proportion to growing up in the 70’s and discovering other distractions! At 17 I left Iraq on a college scholarship from the Ministry of Oil to study construction management in England. My first encounter with a non Iraqi home made wine was at a Pub in Northeast England. It was sweet, white and German, and no I do not remember its name nor would I want to rate it as my memory of it was I drank too much of it in the company of a boisterous pub crowd. Later after graduating from college and while working in London’s fashionable west end for 4 years, wine bars were becoming in vogue and I started to drink an assortment of cheap and mediocre wines from France, Italy and Germany. Although I was living in the Claret consuming heartland I could have been living on the other side of the moon had you mentioned Bordeaux to me let alone 1st growths, left bank and right bank. The emphasis then was just to drink the wine, and never mind color, aroma and palate.
After a lengthy and a happy ten years in England prolonged by wars and trouble back in Iraq, I immigrated to the USA in the mid 80’s where two of my brothers had moved. They had bought a liquor store in San Diego, California. The wine scene then in the popular sense was the jug wines of Gallo and others whose big round bottles had names such as ‘Burgundy’ and ‘Chablis’. However, my brothers were being invited by wholesalers to a multitude of wine tasting events where emerging California winemakers were showing off their labors. Naturally I was curious and tagged along! Through attending these events my interest in wine was rejuvenated and I reconnected with the 13 year old child curious about wine. Some 20 years and thousands of tastings later, I want to share my observations with you. Each wine has a story and my role here is to be the story teller!
