Tasty Tropicals

Homestead, Florida – Americans love their wine.  Winemaking across the Heartland is now a $26 billion busines.  Growers in nearly every state are involved in it.  They produce pineapple wine in Hawaii, honey wine in North Dakota.  And of course, there’s all that wine made from grapes.

But Peter Schnebly of Florida wants you to try something else.  He’s pouring glasses at a tasting at his Schnebly Winery in Homestead.  
“The next one we’re going to have is our guava,” he says to a potential customer.
        
Guava, lychee, and mango wines – “tropical fruit wines – are the specialties on the list today.  Schnebly and his wife Denisse have been growing and processing fruit under the “Fresh King” label in southern Florida for 25 years.  They began looking for a way to use the overripe produce they couldn’t sell.

A winemaker friend from New York suggested, ‘why don’t we try making wine out of our exotic tropical fruits?’  And, of course, I said I didn’t know we could do that. And he said, ‘You can make wine out of rice!’” 

So in 2005, the Schneblys began bottling what they say are the only tropical wines produced in the U.S. that are made with absolutely no grapes.  His venture is believed to be the southernmost winemaking operation in the nation.

But he had to learn some things the hard way. “There was a time I was pressing guava.  And you press, and press, and press, and no juice was coming out.  The dog was around and I was by the garage in the backyard, and all of a sudden it just blew up.  And half of the dog was covered with guava, half of me was covered with guava, and half the garage was covered in guava.

Schnebly had to take other risks to get his business going.
“The scariest part of the whole thing was going out and buying $20,000 worth of presses with no money-back guarantee, and not knowing whether those presses were going to press our fruit correctly.”

Schnebly says the new presses worked even better than anticipated, so the winery was off and running, even attracting other tropical fruit growers to sell it their surpluses. One of them is Charlie Laub.  Laub has a 10-acre spread that produces a fruit called “carambolas,” also known as “star fruit” due to their unusual shape.
 
Laub explains how the carambola is grown.  “Leave it on and let it get ripe. It’s got a relatively sweet but little tangy taste to it.  A little bit like a Granny Smith apple-like taste.”

The carambola is so fragile it must be carefully harvested by hand.  Still, about 25 to 30 percent of the fruit wind up with imperfections that will prevent them from going to market.

Laub demonstrates. “This is basically a bird peck.  This particular one is.  But any cracks or anything like this is non-packable.  Even if you’ve got a little hole like that, it’s not packable.  This is fruit that will go to the winery.”

The Scheblys produced a remarkable 5,000 cases of tropical fruit wines their first year in business.  Since then, they’ve had to work hard to dispel the notion that just because his wines are made from tropical fruits, they’re very sweet.

“We can make a wine dry.  It’s whatever the winemaker decides he or she wants to make.  That’s the most common misconception about winemaking.  You can make a sweet grape wine.  You can make a sweet mango wine.  But you don’t have to.  You can make them both dry if you want.”
                                                   
The Schneblys has big plans to capitalize on having the only established winery in this part of Florida.  They’re working to turn the winery into a tourist destination.  Construction is underway on a 3,000 square-foot tasting room and retail center.
 
They say the larger facility will allow more visitors to enjoy their innovative wines. One visitor delicately sips the guava wine.  “Very unique, very different.  But I will say, very, very good.

“Actually, I’m not a wine connoisseur, so it was a real refreshing taste.” The elaborate tasting room will join waterfalls and ponds that already adorn the Schneblys’ property.

“We really wanted to have that real tropical feel, so people could come out, buy a bottle or two of wine, sit under the tiki hut,” says Peter Schnebly.