In downtown one can keep moving from baladi to baladi, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in on all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground-floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreye, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.
There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.
I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril—a barman in a neat white turban—and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot decide quite where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplate death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.
I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking, in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.
As the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in this traumatized republic, as the women—unimaginable two years ago—wear headscarves in the streets almost uniformly and the beards of the devout multiply, the Cairo drinker wonders how long it will be before the Scarabee Alley becomes a thing of the past. It will not happen overnight. But it is the slow, gradual changes that are the most irreversible.
That winter I was in Cairo to meet two Lebanese winemakers named Labib Kallas and André Hajj-Thomas. These two willing exiles are the bright minds behind the only winery in Egypt that grows its own grapes in the country: EgyBev.
Their company has a headquarters in the formerly affluent suburb of Heliopolis close to the airport and a winery located in the Red Sea party town of Hurghada, several hundred miles south of Cairo and roughly parallel to Luxor. Their vineyards, meanwhile, have been reclaimed from the desert land in the delta some thirty miles north of the capital, in an area that has been growing wine grapes for thousands of years—perhaps longer than anywhere on earth. In the delta once lay the vineyards of ancient Egypt. They have long disappeared, as have most of the modern vineyards established by the Greek winemaker Nestor Gianaclis a hundred years ago. Gianaclis still exists as a winery, but it is now, like most alcohol production in Egypt, owned by Heineken International. Its vineyards still operate in the same delta area as those of Labib Kallas, but Heineken imports most of its grapes for its Egyptian wines from South Africa and Lebanon. Labib, by his own reckoning, has set out to create the only range of authentic, biodynamic, and truly indigenous wines in Egypt. They are Shahrazade, Jardin du Nil, Beausoleil. His vineyards are planted with the usual international varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Viognier, and Chardonnay (from which he makes the only sparkling wine in North Africa, Le Baron). But he also makes a white wine, Beausoleil, from a uniquely Egyptian grape called Bannati. It’s the only Bannati wine in the world.
Labib and André are the kind of worldly, hedonistic middle-aged Lebanese who could only have been produced by a city like Beirut. They are Christians. Most of the inner staff at their company are also Christians. The workers in the vineyards, however, are Muslims, and some are even Salafi. They are not told that the grapes they are tending are meant for the production of wine. They are told they are table grapes.
As it is, many Muslim suppliers—bottlers, label makers—have told the company that their money is no longer halal. In the new climate of Egypt, even a label maker does not want to be associated with a winery.
We drove up on the desolate Alexandria Desert Road, which must once have been beautiful. Now it is semi-industrial, the flatlands crowded by sprawling housing developments for the affluent classes of Cairo. In recent years the city has become so unbearable, so unlivable, that those who can are building condos miles out in the desert just, as Labib puts it, “to breathe.” Yet the revolution has caused this construction frenzy to pause. Around the vast vineyards that Labib and André have created over the last ten years—they are the largest single biodynamic vineyard in the world—the rows of boxlike units stand waiting for the resumption of national prosperity. It may never come.
We walked across the vineyards in cool winter sun. Vines to the horizon in every direction. The two men stopped here and there to watch the workers pruning, intervening to correct their technique. The intricate technical details of viticulture are so alien here that they have to be supervised with constant attention. The two men sometimes sleep out in the vineyards in order to do it around the clock, and over time the field hands have adapted to these peculiar demands. Yet over this whole enterprise, with its initial investment of $2 million, there hangs the inevitable uncertainty of making an alcoholic product in a country that is retreating from its secular inheritance.
André, who is now in his sixties and therefore somewhat older than Labib, lived through the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. He has the tough weariness and joie de vivre that such experiences generate. As we strolled down a long line of Chardonnay stock, he bent down and kept picking up the sandy, slightly stony soil and filtering it through his fingers.
“I give this country another five years, and then we’ll be gone. It seems quite clear to me that the Muslim Brotherhood, or even the Salafis, who are much more extreme, will come to shape the whole culture in their image. This country is 50 percent illiterate. Half the population cannot believe that a good Muslim political candidate could in any way be a bad man. They will vote for him if the imam tells them to.”
Egyptians, he went on, do not think of beer as truly alcoholic. They make an exception for it and do not tax it highly. It is the national beverage, and it will probably remain so. But wine is heavily taxed, and it is not seen so favorably. Like hard liquor, it is seen as alien and European and inherently sinful. Moreover, it possesses little of the inherent allure of whisky and vodka. The prevalence of drink in Nasser’s Egypt centered on the usual beverages of the newly decolonized world. It is a colonial inheritance, as it is everywhere, and one that has until now not been repudiated. For until now almost nothing of the colonial inheritance has been repudiated except its abstract ideas about race. For all the rhetoric that liberation created, the whisky and soda remain alongside the electricity grids, the roads, and the airports. Only Islam has begun to roll back that tide, and it, too, will keep most of the goodies but not the booze, the music, or the film.
The Egyptian Revolution, meanwhile, has not made Labib and André optimistic. There is no ins
titutional core to the society and none can be created out of nothing, and certainly not overnight. It is a vacuum, it has been a vacuum for half a century. Into the original vacuum of the Revolution of 1952 the army moved, as always happens. They have run the country ever since. Egypt has decayed decade by decade. Forty million illiterates, and a city that is fragmenting, falling into pieces. Into dust and ruin.
I asked them out of curiosity whether Cairo could be rebuilt as Beirut has been, by the construction company Solidere, after the Lebanese civil war. They shrugged. The civil war in Lebanon destroyed Beirut. The historic city all but vanished. To rebuild it as Solidere has done, with shining skyscrapers created by the company’s total territorial control of the city center, was possible there. Cairo is the opposite. It is decaying, but it has not been destroyed. Its decay will therefore go on forever. It is entropy, not reinvention. Egyptians, if you want to look on the bright side, are not the kind to slaughter one another over differences.
“But in the meantime,” Labib concluded, as we walked around piles of his homemade biodynamic compost, “we are the only genuine wine left in Egypt. Yet we could not get a permit from the local Giza authorities to put our winery next to our vineyards. It has to be four hundred miles away!”
Nevertheless, it’s only a one-hour flight to Hurghada. The next day we were there, driving from the beach town to the far more exclusive resort development of El Gouna, half an hour north on the coast. It is there that the Lebanese wine men both live and work—the winery is next door to the Arabian-themed adobe faux-village built around a marina. They have bought condos in the Arabian complexes, between which cobbled alleys attempt to evoke the narrow streets of a meticulously restored medina in the Gulf.
The style here is very Dubai. Shops, restaurants, clubs, nautical equipment stores, antique outlets all merge into an ethnic mall executed in apparently local materials and quietly furnished with Wi-Fi. El Gouna is a gated community where everything has been built from scratch. For the Cairene rich, it is a desirable fantasy, an escape into efficiency and dustlessness. Here the gilded young come on their EgyptAir charters, dressed in Dutti and Burberry and chattering in the new language of Arabenglish. The marina is filled with luxury yachts registered in ports all over the world. Alcohol flows freely in every outlet.
El Gouna is one of those representations of the West, one of its outposts in a far-flung corner of an Islamic desert landscape, that continue to nourish an idea of a secular civilization that is otherwise perceived as dying by the very people who are seduced by it. The culture of the drinkers, of the free people who can do as they please, is the same culture whose maternity wards are empty, whose public finances are in a death spiral, and whose self-absorbed banalities no longer enchant those who were once their most avid admirers.
We visited the winery during the day. It is a state-of-the-art place, similar in every way to comparable wineries in the West. Here we sat among the steel fermentation tanks and drank through vertical tastings of their offerings, including the low-end Moon Reef, sold as an “all inclusive” wine in Egypt’s Club Med resorts, and the Le Baron rosé méthode champenoise.
Labib described taking his wines to an international trade fair in Montpellier. Medals, praise, bafflement were the result: an Egyptian wine is not an easy sell. Egyptians themselves are glumly skeptical. They refer to their homegrown wines as Château Panadol. The very idea is tenuous, fragile. Labib even makes a pretty good grappa, but Egyptians will not drink it. Their arak is their best bet.
But even arak is not the national drink of Egypt. Beer is. At night, however, seated in the marina restaurants with their resolute American food, we drank the Jardin du Nil reds and the elegant white Bannati Beausoleil, and the two men mused that an eventual return to Lebanon was all but inevitable. But what about a displacement to the West? I asked.
No, that was now suddenly a little less appealing than it had once been. The West was saturated, aging, overtaxed. It was not particularly enjoyable as a place. And they were Arabs. They wanted to be among the Arabs. They wanted to change the Arabs by refining their palates. Besides, making wine in Egypt was at least a novelty, it was an adventure. It was even possible that one day in the future, the Egyptian middle class would tire of endless strawberry juices and convert to wines made in their own delta. It depended on whether prosperity ever returned to the land.
“Did you see,” André said one night, “that member of the Egyptian parliament who began singing prayers in the middle of a parliamentary session? It’s gone viral on YouTube in Egypt. It’s almost a brawl. He won’t shut up, and the speaker has to shout him down. It was Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafist politician. This is the way it is going. They can’t even discuss normal things in the parliament without these lunatics bursting into prayer and disrupting everything. They would happily tear up all the vineyards we have planted, and they have said that they will.”
On the marina of El Gouna stands a renowned nightclub called Loca Loca. Its booming music can be heard all over the village, and through its windows we could see bodies writhing to rave music.
“There seems,” Labib said, “to be something in the Egyptian character that might prevent that happening. I might be wrong. They used to say the same thing about Iran.”
“But Iran’s history is not over,” I said. “Like Egypt, it is much older than Islam. Like Lebanon, for that matter.”
“It’s only Arabia that is not older than Islam, and even that is actually. But here the awareness of ancient Egypt is so overwhelming. It will always be there.”
The beautiful little painted figures of beer makers of the Old Kingdom, with their supple breasts and hips: the brewers of Meket-Re are not the only ones in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
“Here,” he went on, “the drinking of something like beer was thousands of years old before Islam arrived. It had gone too deep. I don’t know if they drank beer in medieval Cairo, but I’d bet they did.”
“I think,” André put in, “that they drink beer in this country exactly as the ancients did. As a kind of surrogate water. It’s not ghettoized as alcohol.”
“It’s still the national drug.”
Regardless of the alcoholic habits of, say, the Fatimid period, I thought then of Kerényi and his claim for a possible Egyptian origin of beer and mead. The fermentations at the time of the reappearance of the Dog Star in July. The magical atmosphere of intoxication. If it had been drunk here for five thousand years, or even more, it could not be proscribed. It was strange, too, to think that mead was a staple drink of the English almost until modern times, but that today it is virtually the only alcoholic drink that cannot be obtained as a commercial product. Meodu, the Anglo-Saxons called it. The fermented timeless honey drink of the Nile.
Later, we went to Loca Loca and drank toxicly strong cocktails. The drinks were so powerful that the crowd seemed more stoned on mescal than drunk on alcohol. It was a sexual crowd, a pickup crowd, mostly Egyptian, Lebanese, and European, and it drank in a hard, purposeful, self-forgetting way. The symbiosis of bodily, erotic freedom and alcohol once again flared up. Or as the Earl of Rochester had it:
Cupid, and Bacchus, my Saints are,
May drink, and Love, still reign,
With Wine, I wash away my cares,
And then to Cunt again.
Back in Cairo, I spent some days alone at the Windsor, venturing nightly down to the decaying bar and its trophied antlers and drinking cold glasses of disgusting Omar Khayyam with plates of hummus. The place was often empty. Marco leaned his elbows on the bar, and we talked about the old days. Ah, how magnificent Cairo was then. A lake of precious distillations at which intellectuals and men of taste could sip at their leisure like glorious honeybees. It was all over now.
Where were the intellectuals and the men of taste? Where was the grace and the finesse of yore? The deep sophistication of Egypt must still be there somewhere, like a hidden river waiting to reemerge into daylight. It could never totally run dry, since from t
he time of the pharaoh Djoser on, it had never done so. But there were periods of darkness. Periods of dry.
On the pavements of 26th July, I sometimes passed old-time liquor stores, tiny dens that reminded me of the permit rooms of Pakistan. There was a larger one called Orphanides, obviously once Greek-owned; a few blocks away stood a corner store called Humbaris, whose window was filled with unusual indigenous brews that I had not seen before, not even in the baladis. Here there were bottles of Zabiba Extra arak, as well as Rucard and Zahia, the latter with a lovely label of palms on a sand-yellow background. There were Grant’s and Highland whisky, Biulli’s—described as “Old Egyptian Whiskey”—and Wadie Horse (a deliberate play, I assume, on White Horse), and yet another “Egyptian” Scotch called Chivas Regal. There was a thing called Red Greec Soldier (sic), which might have been an ouzo, and Marcel J & B whisky, described on its label as “A Blwnd of the Super Old Drink Egyption” (sic). There was a potion called the Red Barrel Brand, identified as a French type “Matignonne,” and dust-covered bottles of a thing known as Valentine’s “Marceil.” Even more unnerving was an evil-looking squat bottle with a blue label marked “Vodka of Cairo.” Five Egyptian pounds la bouteille, it said. Instant death in a lonely hotel room.
But among these native oddities, which evade by their very nature the 450 percent tax that is levied on alcoholic imports, I found at Orphanides a bottle of Le Baron rosé “champagne.” I went into the store to buy it.
Inside, the radio blasted Islamic music and prayers, and the staff, astonished to see me, craned forward as they tried to decipher my appalling Arabic. Yes, they had the champagne, but they would have to dig it out of the storeroom. I waited, and they brought me a cup of tea. Perhaps they hoped I would buy a second bottle and maybe a bit of Cairo vodka thrown in. Eventually, however, the Le Baron appeared, heavily dusted like most of the bottles there, and it was wiped down with a cloth and handed to me rolled in newspaper. I took it home through downtown to the Windsor, went up to my chilled room with Mustafa in the elevator, and put the bottle in my ancient fridge. An hour later it was cold.
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