BEIRUT: “Wine is the new alcohol,” says Michel Gibran, who, along with his business partner Tommy Tabib co-owns a wine bar, L’Osteria, in the emerging Beirut district of Mar Mikhael. Despite the enduring popularity of arak and beer, Gibran was not worried about attracting customers when the bar was opened two years ago.

“Lebanon was the first country to make wine. Lebanese people like wine,” he states simply.

It seems Gibran is right. Statistics released late last month by the International Wine and Spirit Research show wine consumption in the country has increased almost 10 percent over the past year. Gibran and Tabib are now opening another wine bar in the same district, La Bouteille, and believe that too, will have no trouble attracting customers.

“Wine is becoming more trendy,” says Carlos Khachan, who founded Club Grappe, the country’s only only wine tasting club. He believes wine has worked its way into people’s lifestyles. “The trend now is to drink rose by the pool during summer.”

Wadih Riachi, the manager of Vintage wine cellar in Saifi, which has been importing wine since 1975 and open as a shop since 2002, agrees that pink is the new red. “We’re selling rose like hotcakes,” he says. Vintage currently sells around eight different roses, more than double what it sold last year.

However, wine remains a relatively niche interest in the country, counting for only 10 percent of the alcohol drunk, according to the IWSR.

This is still significantly more than other countries in the region – in Syria it accounts for only 1.7 percent of the market – but much less than European countries. In Italy, for example, wine represents 56 percent of the alcohol market.

“We are arak consumers,” says Khachan of the Lebanese market.

But arak, a symbol of traditional Lebanon, has fallen out of fashion in recent years, and wine is beginning to take its place, evidenced by a growing depth of knowledge about the subject.

“Before, people would purchase entry level wines,” says Riachi. “Now they tend to spend a little more and get better quality.”

Significant decreases on taxes on imported wine have also fueled the popularity. European wines, which were taxed at 56 percent two years ago, are now taxed at 36 percent.

Despite this, wine in Lebanon is still not the cheap, everyday drink that it is in, for instance, the U.K., Lebanon’s biggest market for wine exports.

“We’re not overwhelmed by flows of cheap wine,” Riachi says, unlike other markets in the world where bottles are sold for little more than the price of a shawarma. He says people tend to drink wine when they’re out, and believes that the growth of luxury restaurants, particularly in Beirut, is piquing people’s interest in wine.

“When people dine out, they choose good wines,” he says. “They don’t necessarily buy the same wines at home, but at least then they have tried something new.”

Lebanon’s own brands, in competition with increasingly cheap international wines, still have some way to go to build up recognition on the country’s streets. Chateau Musar is a household name in the U.K., but little known here, where Kefraya and Ksara have a near-monopoly on the market.

Elie Marmaari, export manager at Ksara, attributes this to the relative infancy of the country’s wine production, which has grown substantially in the last 10 years, when there were around eight wineries, until today, when there are around 35.

“Brand recognition depends on the history of the winery,” Marmaari says, adding that smaller brands such as Wardy and Clos St. Thomas are becoming more recognizable.