Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is. In this episode, we find out America's southernmost winery. Do you have a guess? Let me give you a hint.

Aloha.

Oh, you guessed it. Volcano Hawaii is where we venture to.

My name is Kendall, and I'm the assistant manager and lead sales associate here at Volcano Winery.

Well, hello, Kendall. When you first come into the parking lot and you look at the winery, what are we looking at?

Yeah. So when you first take a glance at volcano winery, the first thing that will definitely jump out to you is that we grow grapes here. We have rows of grapevines, japanese tea plants, olive trees, and a one of a kind hawaiian grown cork tree. You'll also have a cork tree. So it's an oak tree, but it's harvested. You harvest cork from it. So the outer layer of the tree is how you harvest cork, and it regenerates every seven years. And that's what you use to cork up the wine. As you know, corks is what we pop in that bottle to keep it nice and sealed up. We also have a small tasting room, and in addition to that, we offer a free vineyard and production room tour. In the backdrop, you'll see Mauna loa volcano on the left and Mauna kea volcano on the right. And then we're heavily forested up in this area. We have tons of native forest and lava tubes on the property here.

Whoa. Lava tube, what is that?

The volcano systems on this island, they are not the explosive volcano that you would expect to see. They're called shield volcanoes. And so a shield volcano, instead of exploding out, it houses the lava in a big crater. And then when it goes to release the lava, it shoots it out, kind of like a plumbing system. It shoots it through all the lava tubes, which are under our feet.

So you're just outside of Hawaii volcanoes national park. I imagine you get a lot of traffic coming from the park.

Yeah. So we're about 2 miles from the national park entrance. So a lot of the times we have customers that are hiking during the day, and then they come check us out for an afternoon tasting or kind of the opposite. People come in first thing in the morning and do a little tasting so that they can go hiking with a little buzz, little wine buzz.

Right. So that mountain that volcano doesn't look so big when they're hiking it.

Yeah. In reality, those are the two biggest mountains in the world. If you. If you measure them from under the ocean to the tippy, tippy tops of those mountains.

Taller than Mount Everest.

Yeah.

Wow. So I was reading on the website where you're very passionate about sustainability. So I imagine over the years, you've had to do some experimenting to make that happen.

We've experimented with a lot of different grape varietals here, and we've narrowed down to four varietals that work really good for our microclimate here in volcano. And those would include a grape called symphony. And symphony is a hybrid. UC Davis, California, actually created this grape in the forties by doing a cross of the Muscat grape and the Grenache gris. So it's kind of a sweeter white grape, and we try to blend it through a lot of our wine since it's the main grape that we're producing here. We also do a grape called Cayuga White, and that was created at Cornell University for the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. So that grows really well here. And then for red wines, we do Pinot noir and Syrah. And those four grapes do really well here. We can produce some really well rounded wines that really embody what you would imagine wine tasting like from Hawaii. They're fruity, they're light, they're juicy, and a little bit on the sweeter side. But, yeah, that's kind of what you expect coming from a hawaiian wine.

That is it for part one in our next episode, as we continue speaking with Kendall of volcano winery, we learn about their sustainability goals and their fundraising. All right, pace yourself because you're going to have to do this all day for very little money. Oh, I know. And I haven't run out of energy yet. It is time now. Yeah. For our listener voicemail question.

Hi, this is Peggy from Long Beach, California. What is the standard tasting pour when you go to wine taste? Thank you.

Good question, Peggy. Doing my own informal poll and speaking with different wineries. It varies. Some wineries 1oz, others two to three. Obviously, it's at the discretion of the winery. But remember, they love it when you buy their wine, so they let you sample. And keep in mind, if you plan on buying, don't hesitate to ask for another sample. Surely you can't be serious.

I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the best five minute wine podcast was produced by I hism if you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.