I’m kinda sick of grapes. It isn’t their fault though. Honestly, for thousands of years people have obsessed about grapes and making wine from them. People act as if grapes are the only fruit that can make a good wine.
Have you been in the wine section of a store recently. Hundreds of wines. All from grapes. All different regions. All somehow unique.
Yet how many other fruits have you seen made into wine on those shelves? Probably zero. But does that mean you can only make and drink grape wine?
Now don’t get me wrong, grapes do make a good wine. But are they the end all of wine?
I think people have lost their minds when it comes to grape wines. The industry is obsessed with itself. The pretentions and obsessiveness over minute differences is exhausting. And personally I’m kinda sick of the pride parades worshiping the grape.
And personally, I love grape wine. But, I live in the Caribbean. And we can’t really make a good grape wine here. So maybe that’s why I’m irritated with that little purple fruit.
So I make wine with fruits that thrive here in the tropics. And these are those wines.
Guavaberry Wine
This is one of the rarest wines out there. Made from the elusive and seldom found fruit of the guavaberry tree. There is nothing like this fruit on the planet. The tree is indigenous to the island and is not really grown commercially anywhere in the world (St. Maarten does have some small-scale commercial growers but their industry is extremely small).
We make wine, liqueur and sauces from this little berry. Come taste one of the most sought after wines in the world.
Mango Wine
I grow a ton of different fruit. But mango is one of my favorite.
I get sad sometimes using all the mangos to make wine. I want to eat them. Eat them all.
But demand at the winery has skyrocketed for this fruit. So I have to watch with a tear in my eye as thousands of them are pressed into an amazing wine. I always have to make sure I’m in the orchard around harvest time so I can at least grab a few for eating.
Banana Wine
When I embarked on this wine adventure I wanted to make wines from fruits that grow easily down here in the subtropics.
I had banana trees in my yard that my wife’s father had planted in the 70s or 80s. The dang things are still down there propagating and producing and I ain’t done a dang thing to them.
So I thought bananas would be a good wine options. So then I started researching making banana wine and all you can find are African people that do some weird things to make their “wine”.
Sorry but I’m not burying bananas or throwing them into a tree trunk or mashing them in my toes.
So all we do is take the bananas and add some sugar and yeast. It makes an excellent wine.
Starfruit Wine
Our winemaking origin story. When my wife and I were dating she planted a small starfruit tree in her front yard.
Within a few years of planting, we were overrun with starfruit. But we didn’t use a single fruit – they would all fall to the ground and rot to be eaten by wild chickens and iguanas.
Then one year I got serious about using the fruit and decided to make a wine. I had never made wine before but I bought books, watched videos and made my first batch of starfruit wine in a 5 gallon jug.
That wine was amazing and started my love affair with winemaking.