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A hand holding a swing-top bottle with a yellow Néctar Nómada label, full of a pale cloudy liquid; beside it a plastic bag of the same

The wine that ferments inside the palm

Some ferments are taken out and fermented elsewhere. Not this one: the palm is the vessel, and it is milked twice a day for weeks.

1The wine bottled, and the bag it is sold in there · 21 Feb 2024, 17:33

On 21 February 2024 we went to see how palm wine is made, on the farm across from her house, with the family's own palms. Pirri's mother guided us, and took the chance to do it with her son.

There are several ways to get it. One is from the heart shoot. The one we saw is another: you cut the bark and open the chamber where the heart of the palm is. It is left to ferment right there.

The wine is drawn from that same palm twice a day, morning and evening, sometimes for thirty days. It is not a matter of opening it and leaving it: it has to be tended daily — draw, clean, and let more sap come and keep fermenting.

It is not the only place. It is also made at El Cedro, a spot by the Río Santa María, just before Vueltas Largas on the way into the town of Santa Fe. Same area, another weekend, and other people tending it just as daily.

And that is what makes it unlike everything else we make. In any other ferment you take the material out and ferment it apart. Here the palm is the fermenter: the sap ferments on its own, spontaneously, inside the trunk itself, and is drawn off for as long as it lasts.

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A palm frond seen close up, with long black spines along the rachis
2The frond, with its spines along the rachis · 17:57IMG_6353
Macro of amber resin beading on the orange fibrous surface of a freshly cut palm trunk
3Resin beading on the cut, close up · 17:59IMG_6363
A palm crown seen from below against the sky, a bunch of round fruits hanging from the spadix and dry fibre on the trunk
4The crown from below, the bunch hanging from the spadix · 18:04IMG_6378
A person walking away through the scrub with the bottle in hand at dusk, the mountain range behind
5Walking back with the bottle, the range behind · 18:07IMG_6387
The bottle on a wooden table beside small tasting glasses
6The next day, on the table with the glasses · 22 Feb, 20:5920240222_205906
17:48. The extraction: the pot collecting from the opened trunk, and the bottle to carry it away.

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Where it comes from, who works it, and what you can take home.

Engraving: a man splitting a palm trunk with a machete, among fronds and water, inside an oval frameProject

Palm wine

The one ferment where the vessel is the plant itself: the sap ferments inside the trunk.

The project