Observations from a novice: Week 7: Return to the motherland

Having just recently returned from a trip to Lebanon to visit our producers, I am blown away again by how fundamentally different tastes, preferences and values can be from country to country.

Sitting around chatting into the night, bellies full of lovely Lebanese nosh, lovingly and time-consumingly put together by my mother in law, the conversation turned to our new business in the UK. People listened with eager anticipation, wondering how the country they love so much and feel is so misrepresented is going down in the wine world. We talk endlessly about the market, the economy and our approach to selling in the awesomeness that is the British wine industry.

All are eager to understand what we are doing and how well it is going, so, in order to give them a taste (pardon the pun) of what we are about, we decide to crack open a bottle of one of our best sellers in the UK that my supportive parents in law have bought from the vineyard without really thinking about it, or tasting it first.

The posh glasses are extracted from their display cabinet in eager anticipation. The said wine is brought forth like a newly born baby and my husband expertly opens, decants and serves everyone. Smiling faces are met with enormous amounts of detail on a subject that they have barely thought about before. Lessons in identifying the colour and smelling the aromas are given with great enthusiasm, seeming as experts to our family, we inwardly smile at our own appearance of expertise, all too aware ourselves of how little we know in comparison to the rest of the industry in the UK. It is nice to be the ones in the know for a change.

Then comes the tasting. My husband, having already checked that the wine is OK, sips forth and with the appropriate punctuation of umms and aahhs, explains the grape varieties and maturation process. The assembled group respond in kind with plentiful slurps, my husband and I look at each other excited to see and hear the response and ...what happens...nothing but stunned silence, slowly overtaken by an unspoken exclamation of disappointment.

It takes us a good half an hour of fake compliments to get them to finally admit that this wine is not really their cup of tea (or Arak as it is in Lebanon). After an initial sense of disappointment ourselves, my husband and I settle down to finish the bottle of wine that we can barely keep enough stock of in the UK.

Not to be totally down trodden however, we are reassured days later when we meet up with some wine experts who then sing the praises of said wine and we also meet a Lebanese Australian who can't drink enough of it... it is with these final sentiments that my husband and I console ourselves and admit that perhaps it is a good thing that every country has its own taste...!

Lucy Khoneizer is the owner of new (and hopefully very successful) company, Lebanese Fine Wines.

• Harpers Says...