In 2022, Claudine Lteif was helping her best friend Michelle Chami in the winery at Mersel Wines in Dimane, a small village 60 miles northeast of Beirut. The friends noticed something disturbing behind the scenes of Lebanon’s wine industry, in which men overwhelmingly hold positions of leadership: the invisible female work force. While men hold the vast majority of Lebanon’s winery positions, women comprise most of the nation’s vineyard workers, many of them Syrian refugees.
Harvest starts very early in the morning and when we’d pick the women up , we’d see them putting a load of washing on and hanging it up. We’d ask them, “What time did you wake?” And they’d say, “Since 4:30 a.m.”. They’d go to harvest, then go home and to make up the lost time away from the family, they have to do a mouneh .