For the midterm break, I was lucky enough to visit Maui with a handful of friends. After a hike in the Haleakala national park, we stopped by the Maui winery for a tasting on our way home.
This winery is atypical in the sense that it produces a lot of pineapple wine. Instead of using grapes as the substrate for its products, it uses pineapple. The resulting products are white wines that are a touch sweeter than the average grape wine but not as much as you would expect when hearing the phrase "pineapple wine". They come in 3 varieties: sparkling, sweet and semi dry. On average, these wines take about 6 months to produce from freshly pressed pineapple. This experiment started as a way to pass time while waiting for grapes to ripen, but now represents 2/3 of the local production.
Despite the fact that the majority of its production never leaves Hawaii, the Maui Winery is currently licensed to ship to 28 different states, including California. While this made for a lovely addition to my visit to the Islands, I'm not sure that pineapple wine will become a category of its own the way ice wine did with Inniskillin. The scale that one would need to reach in order to absorb the incremental shipping costs to the US or Asian markets from Hawaii makes it intuitively difficult to achieve. I also believe that part of the appeal of the experience of drinking such an atypical wine is to do so in the state where pineapple is a staple of one's diet. I have trouble imagining New Yorkers consuming pineapple wine in the middle of winter except during the occasional outing to a Hawaiian restaurant. However, I do think that the market for on site tastings and potentially shipping a case or two afterwards will continue to grow as more Millennials achieve the financial stability to visit Maui.
What do you think? Will pineapple wine stay a local curiosity or should I have done my midterm project on Hawaii as the next great wine region?
Carl, I agree with your intuition that pineapple wine will likely stay local to Hawaii with a few exceptions related to tourism. Beyond the expense of supply and shipping, we've discussed how wine is not just a product but an experience. I imagine that that drinking pineapple wine after a long hike around a national park in Hawaii or a day on the beach is quite different than a pineapple wine served up in the states.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I wonder if other tropical climates also have this tradition of pineapple wine. In that case, perhaps there is a chance to build a brand that distributes through hotel chains. In that case, perhaps pineapple wines can reinvent themselves as the new age, healthier pina colada.