Flor de Pochote

Nature gives us two options: Wine or vinegar - both of which are a result of a process, where yeast converts sugar to alcohol. Until now we have paid most attention to the production of wine, as it preserves more of the original characteristics of the fruits - and not to forget: Adds more value to the product.

Furthermore the cashew fruit was the reason why we got the idea to produce wine in the first place. We planted fifty trees with the objective to harvest cashew nuts. However, for each nut there will be one fruit (se photo below: the 'marañón' fruit has the particularity that the seed is set outside a 'false fruit'). The fruit appears very attractive, but a bitter oil makes you regret soon enough, if you start eating it raw. Only cooking, or making wine, neutralize the oil.
A good harvest can give up to 2000 fruits per tree. So we had to do something if we did not want to get stuck with a hundred thousand fruits a year.

After some experimentation with various techniques we found out that the local farmers method was the best:

We simple press the juice, add sugar and leave the bottle in the sun. Naturally availble yeast does the rest of the job.

Most of our wines are rather strong. The fermentation stops naturally at about 20% alcohol content. If we want a lower content of alcohol , we have to control the process with additives.

This allows the CO₂ from the fermentation to escape, but avoids the entrance of oxygen. Hence the presence of oxygen would produce vinegar.