Friday, November 12, 2010

Belize wines!

Fruit and vegetable stalls often sell homemade farm wines from different exotic tropical fruits, you probably have never heard of, or eaten, or tasted.
Belize wines!


( Contributed comment from Belizean - Sharon Auxillou Urscheler )
They have a winery here in Homestead, Florida that produces wines from the ripe fruit that the fruit vegetable packers can't sell because they are too ripe to ship to stores and wouldn't last in shipping/packaging. They make mango, lychee, guava, passion fruit, avocado, carambola wines. They even have a hurricane wine from a mixup of fruit in a hurricane. All are very good and maintain the actual fruit flavor. They did not want to lose that and came up with their own recipes for each wine. It's called Schnebly winery and its great. They are doing agri-tourism so they produce the wines, but they also do wine tastings for a fee, tours of the winery, Friday nights music and dinner nights etc. It all started because a lot of fruit and vegetables were going to waste (the were fruit and vegetable packers/shippers). grapes did not grow here and they were only allowed to use local fruit grown within 10 miles of the winery. I think they have a web site if you want to check it out. It is small scale but they are shipping to Publix Supermarket chain and other states now. Cost is about $15 usa a bottle. They also teamed up with FIU's tourism/hospitality dept. and so the student there get practice with food preparation, serving, viniculture experience etc. The artwork they use on the bottles come from kids produced artwork done by an elementary school with art classes and they pay the kids for the fruit artwork. This has worked well for producing jobs in the local area and providing opportunity to disadvantaged kids.

Sharon ( Auxillou ) Urscheler, SUrscheler@msn.com
Caye Caulker, Hillview and Redlands-South Florida
(Tradewinds tourist overnight condos on Caye Caulker, Flora-Tech Nursery and Landscaping in S.Florida )

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