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A bottled fruit garden sparkles for the Lang-ay

BAUKO, Mountain Province (Oct. 23) — In the old days, visitors in the Montañosa (collective name for an area now divided into Benguet and Mountain Province) were always treated to a Lang-ay, when the host would bring out the best rice wine tapuy, kept in Chinese earthen jars or the native gusi in the darkest untouched part of the Igorot hut. Aged to perfection, the tapuy was almost heaven-sent.

Raised in the traditional wine-making society, three women entrepreneurs from this town are among 56 enterprising families of Mountain Province who have ventured into wine-making.

Nenita Decaleng, Teresita Bullion and Rebecca Malicdan literally gather fruits in season and ferment these into one of the best tasting sparkling bottled drinks in this part of the country. Like their colleagues in the Mountain Province Wine Processors’ Association, or Lang-ay, the three produce wines out of bignay, pineapple, guava, cherry, strawberry, mango and cacao, in addition to the traditional tapuy or rice-wine.

These fruits are locally available, declares Bullion. Decaleng, however, reveals that she gets bignay or bugnay, little purple sour berries, in Cervantes town in Ilocos Sur.

It was by accident that Malicdan showed her wine samples to this NORDIS reporter. A day later, Bullion was already giving out free bottles for sampling. It was Decaleng, though, who allowed entry into the inner chamber of her store where buckets of fermenting liquid are usually off-limits to the unauthorized.

“The secret lies in the ageing process,” reveals one of them, as samplers savor the sparkling strawberry wine. They told visitors that the fermentation alone takes six months. After fermentation, the fruit juice is transferred to another container for ageing.

The longer, the better, they all say. The clearer the wine, the better it will taste, according to the wine-makers. Actually, it all depends on the person tasting it, the on-lookers say. Whatever, a half-drunk companion could have said, but held her peace with another free shot.

Wine-making is gaining popularity among Mountain Province families. Some claim that it started in Otucan, a barangay in Bauko. Later, our informant said, it attracted more from nearby Bila, also in Bauko, until the word spread and later, more families in the towns of Tadan, Sabanga and Sagada joined the bandwagon.

“There is a large market for home-made fruit wines,” Bullion volunteered. They sell their product in tourist destinations such as Baguio City, Banawe, Sagada and Bontoc.

Sometimes, they find themselves faced with the dilemma of meeting the increasing demand for the wines. When orders are placed and there are not enough aged wines in the cellars, they are tempted to bottle cloudy liquid.

The organization frowns at the malpractice, however. They said selling before the wines are due would destroy their reputation. The mounting orders for their wines inspire the women to produce more.

According to Bullion and her friends at the Luis Hora Memorial Regional Hospital, they have been thinking of ways to pool resources for the wine-making industry. They submit a portion of their produce to the Lang-ay which takes care of marketing. They also market some of their products individually.

Asked how much these women earn from their wines, they just said, “It is equivalent to a garden in the Halsema.”

Honestly, there was a garden in those sparkling bottles of fuchsia, red, purple and yellow wines. By the way, they come in a package of P100, P120 and P300 per bottle, carrying such names as Zaira’s Fruit Wine, Mountain Wine, Greenfield Fruit Wine, Carolina’s Fruit Wine, Emilia’s Native Wine, and other familiar Filipina name that you can think of. # Lyn V. Ramo for NORDIS

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