COURTESY OF MITCHELL SILVER Haunani Ah Yat, above, the weekend tasting room manager at Tedeschi Vineyards on Maui, stands next to Mr. Featheringers on the Maui Winery grounds.

Taste of Maui

Haunani Ah Yat helps visitors
learn about island wines

It was a beautiful snowy day atop Maui's Haleakala when Haunani ("beautiful snow") Ah Yat was born in Kula. Now a busy 54 years later, the former Haunani Burns is back living in Kula and enjoying working Saturdays through Tuesdays leading tour groups and wine tastings at Tedeschi Vineyards/Maui Winery at Ulupalakua Ranch in Upcountry Maui.

Who: Haunani Ah Yat Title: Weekend tasting room supervisor at Tedeschi Vineyards/Maui Winery Job: Takes visitors groups on tours of the winery grounds and offers complimentary tastings

Before joining the winery, Ah Yat worked in sales for Prince Resorts Hawaii, most recently for the Maui Prince Resort. A graduate of Hilo High School on the Big Island, she started in the tourism industry in the 1960s, as a housekeeper at the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu. She later moved to the hotel's front desk, where she thrived interacting with the visitors directly -- like she does now at the winery.

Ah Yat is married to retired Honolulu fireman Leon Ah Yat. They live in Kula with their two dogs.

Question: Your title is weekend tasting room supervisor. These are just weekend tours?

Answer: No, actually, just on the weekends all the office folks are off, but we take people on free tours and offer free tastings every single day that we're open.

Q: So why do they call you the weekend supervisor?

A: Because I'm the boss of the weekend tasting. (Laughter). The other managers are away, so I'm in charge.

Q: How long do the tours take?

A: We have two scheduled tours each day, and whenever we get started, either at 10:30 or 1:30, it takes about a half an hour.

What I like to do is do a little bit of history first, because our winery is part of a 20,000-acre cattle ranch. So we go back about a hundred or 150 years in history, and talk about our agriculture, our farming, our cattle ranching, all the unique trees. People are so interested in that. The property just jumps out at you.

And then we get into the wine business. We got into the business 30 years ago. The anniversary was Aug. 1.

We make all different kinds of wines here. We provide a daily menu of our wines, because we make, like, three pineapple wines, there's five different grape wines, and a specialty dessert wine made from raspberries.

Q: But that isn't from Maui (raspberries).

A: It is!

Q: Where do those come from?

A: We produced the raspberry wine quite by accident. Three years ago we had a 4-ton harvest of fresh raspberries from Maui -- from Maui Land & Pineapple Co., the company that provides us with all the pineapple juice we use to make our wines. So I don't know if that was an experimental crop or what, but we ended up taking all their raspberries from them.

COURTESY OF MITCHELL SILVER Ah Yat pours complimentary glasses of Framboise de Maui, the winery's specialty raspberry dessert wine, for visitors to the tasting room.

Q: And you turned it into wine.

A: Yes, it's a fortified wine. We added pure cane sugar and spirits, which is the liquid content of alcohol. So it's pretty close to a chambourge or a port. Kind of syrupy and about 20 percent alcohol and sugar content.

Q: Is that a product they sell?

A: We make and sell it here, and we provide it for tasting, too, Whatever we make and sell, we offer for tasting.

Q: What kind of folks show up for the tours?

A: Oh, you name it. We have people from the cruise ships now. Predominately return visitors, just renting a car, coming up for the day. And people on the Hana tours, on the tour package coming round from Hana.

We can greet between 300 and 500 people a day. (Laughter) So people often ask how many bottles of wine do we pour each day.

Q: Well, how many do you pour each day?

A: It's just a guess, but probably up to 20 or 30 bottles a day.

Q: Which of the company wines is your favorite?

A: My favorite is the Rose Ranch Cuvee. It's made from the hybrid grape called the carnelian, a grape that (vineyards founder) Mr. Tedeschi brought in.

Q: Which one seems to be most popular with the visitor wine tasters?

A: The pineapple wines are the most popular, because they are so different. Our number one selling wine is the Maui Splash., It's made with pineapple and passion fruit. It's a little sweeter.

COURTESY OF MITCHELL SILVER Tedeschi Vineyards/ Maui Winery offers public tours of its grounds twice daily, with many of the half-hour excursions being led by Haunani Ah Yat, at left in muumuu. The vineyards and winery comprise about 22 acres within the larger, 20,000-acre Ulupalakua Ranch, owned by the Erdman family. The daily winery tours culminate with a stop at the wine-tasting room, where visitors can sample the several kinds of wines that the company makes and sells.

Q: Do you partake while your on the job?

A: Uh huh, especially if it's a boring day -- boy, you know it. (Laughter)

But seriously, we have to taste everything that we sell -- especially if there's a new product. Like on our anniversary, we debuted a new product called Upcountry Gold; it was made from a chenin blanc grape, which is a white grape.

Q: Have you had any formal study in wines?

A: Not really. There's a lot of literature here, so I just soak myself in binders and binders of information, as well as listen to other people with many years of experience. So you get to learn on the job as well put what you read to use.

Q: How long have you been working for the vineyards.

A: A little over three years.

Q: What were you doing before that?

A: I was working at Prince Resorts.

Q: How come you took this job.

A: I was tired of traveling, because I was in sales at the time. Ten years on the road. Even though I loved it, I was constantly on the road, and I just wanted to stay put.

So now I'm so close to home, and the older you get, you just want to have a base. So I was fortunate to be interviewed by Paula (Hegely, president of the vineyards and winery), and next thing you know, boom.