Tedeschi Vineyards, at Ulupalakua Ranch in Upcountry Maui, looks out over the sea.
Maui in a bottle
The Valley Island's vineyards
and winery are coming of age
Wine grapes are your typical Type A personalities. They thrive on stress. They prefer that you deprive them of water and don't let them get too warm and comfy. That you force them into dormancy in winter, give them soil that makes them fight for nutrients.
Given such a combative lifestyle, these grapes -- mashed and squeezed of their juice -- can make you good wine.
Harvest celebration
30th anniversary of Tedeschi Vineyard: 10 to 2 p.m. Sunday
Place: Ulupalakua Ranch
Events: Tours, champagne-making demonstration, wine-tasting, hula performances
Admission: Free
Call: (808) 878-1266
Too bad for Tedeschi Vineyard.
Located in beautiful Upcountry Maui, where the climate is gentle and warm, the sun plentiful, the rainfall generous, the Tedeschi grape vines grow bushy and green. Too bushy and green. Mother Nature in this case is too kind.
But Paula Hegele, president of Maui's Winery, which owns the vineyard and turns those grapes into wine, is determined to win respect for her product, to bottle a Hawaii-grown, Hawaii-made wine that's not just a souvenir novelty.
Walking the vineyards with her, it is clear that she has the passion for her mission. In fact, it would be best not to get in her way.
"We'll do it because we have to do it," Hegele says.
"It doesn't make any sense on a balance sheet or anything. It's just ... we're going to do it."
Tedeschi Vineyards celebrates its 30th anniversary with an open house Sunday. This birthday marks a coming of age for the vineyard, the winery, their management and marketing.
The first grapes were planted in 1974 by Emil Tedeschi, whose goal was to make a Hawaiian sparkling wine. He planted 150 grape varieties, eventually settling on carnelian (a cross of cabernet, grenache and carignan grapes). His first harvest was in 1980 and the first wine to reach the market, Maui Brut, was bottled in 1983 and released a year later.
To carry the company over in those years while the grape crop was maturing, Tedeschi introduced a pineapple wine, Maui Blanc, in 1977, using juice from local plantations.
Ironically, that "bridge" wine became the backbone of the company. Despite successful production of a variety of blended wines, from Ulupalakua Red to light sparkling whites, the vineyards and winery are best known for their pineapple wines, which represent 70 percent of sales. Maui Splash, a mixture of pineapple and passion fruit, is the top seller among the 200 to 300 bottles sold daily at the winery's tasting room.
This is fine, Hegele says, but limiting. Fruit wines (as opposed to traditional grape wines) have a small profit margin, because you can only charge so much (Maui Splash sells for about $10).
Besides, the company was founded on the desire to make great wine from Hawaii-grown grapes, she says. There's no abandoning the plan now.
The challenges are many, mostly because growing conditions are just too good. "We have no stress," Hegele says.
The goal in viniculture is a long growing season, which means lengthy "hang time" for the grapes. This allows sugars in the fruit to develop naturally and the flavor to physiologically mature, giving the winemaker plenty to work with. "They want to hang out there long enough to get good concentration," Hegele says.
In the gentle, generous Maui sun and rich volcanic soil, the grapes mature too quickly. In addition, this year's plentiful rainfall has meant an overgrowth of leaves, which means moisture collects and mold grows, and that nutrients are pulled from the fruit into the greenery.
Another challenge: birds -- "the turkeys, the pheasants, the mynahs" -- that peck at the grapes in search of water.The solutions? For the birds, nonlethal scare tactics, including a cannon that booms intermittently to startle them off. For the overgrowth, hiring seasonal workers to prune back the leaves, but that's expensive. For the weather -- well, there's no changing that.
Hegele's strategy is to nurture a variety of grapes so that blends can be created that play off all their best qualities.
Hegele works from a position of some strength. The company produces 28,000 cases of wine annually, and "we sell every drop we make, every year."
Most sales come through the winery's tasting room, a sleek, elegant facility that Hegele says attracts 500 to 600 visitors daily. Maui's Winery also maintains online sales and wholesales to several local retailers.
The company did consider converting strictly to pineapple wine for sale to Japan, but Hegele is reluctant to tie the winery's future to the local pineapple industry. Having to import juice would change the very nature of the product.
Hegele took over the company from a sales and marketing background 14 years ago. In that time, the vineyard began planting varietals other than carnelian, including syrah, pinot gris, chenin blanc and two types of chardonnay.
The first chenin blanc, Upcountry Gold, debuted last month, and a pink sparkling wine, Rose Ranch Cuvee, made from carnelian, has been winning converts among the local wine cognoscenti (see accompanying story).
Hegele hopes to upgrade the winery's production facilities over the next few years -- the wine cellar, she says, "is rotting around us" -- although she expects to limit production to 35,000 cases a year.
She'd also like to upgrade the image of Maui wines. This doesn't mean, however, that she expects her wines to reach standards of world-class California or French wines. She seeks another niche.
"We need to do the best we can within our style. We don't need to compete with anyone else's wine. Because we can't. And we shouldn't."
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