Tapping into Palm Wine's Huge Potential

Palm wine is an African cultural icon, but Obongodu Paul wonders if it can reach a wider audience. © Wikimedia Commons | A palm tapper extracts sap from the tree to make Africa's famous palm wine. Imoh Udoh starts before the birds do, on the stretch of trees behind Use Offot, in the belt of family land that runs toward Anua in southern Nigeria. "Amesiere," he says when he meets Ekpeyong Umoh on the footpath, the old greeting for first light. Ekpeyong lifts a hand without breaking stride. "Amesiere-o." Imoh learned the palm wine trade from his uncle, who tapped this same row for 30 years before his knees gave out. He did not teach with his mouth, Imoh says, resting his cutlass against the trunk. "He would just let me follow him up, and if I did it wrong, he would collect the knife back, not saying anything. That is how I learned it." He goes out before the mist has lifted, because the sap runs cool at that time. Once the sun has risen above the roof, the wine has already changed taste, he says. It is not the same wine again. It is the sun that sits on top of the tree, it puts its own taste inside. He climbs without a harness, feet finding notches he cut into the bark years ago, and opens a fresh diagonal groove high on the trunk. The gourd hangs below on raffia rope, and he checks it by weight before he checks it by sight. Straight from the tree, it smells like bread that has not finished rising, he says. Sweet, but not sugar sweet. It is sweet like something that is still becoming. He knows when to stop tapping a tree by the sound the bark gives back. If you tap the place too many times, the sound becomes dull small, he says. "My uncle used to put his ear near the wood, listening to it. That is how I still do it, I do not even think about it." Palm wine is a drink with no export infrastructure, no critic vocabulary, no price outside the local economies that produce it, and Imoh's row of trees is a fair place to understand why. In 1952, a Nigerian writer named Amos Tutuola published a novel built entirely around this same drink. The Palm-Wine Drinkard has since been translated into a dozen languages and sits, uncontested, in the canon of African literature. The wine at its center never followed the book into the world. It has a dozen names depending on where you're standing, ukot mmong among the Anang people here in Akwa Ibom, emu or oguro among the Yoruba, mmanya to the Igbo, gya in Hausa. None of them appear on a wine list anywhere outside the continent. The wine turns fast. By afternoon of the same day, it has already started. By next morning, the sweetness has gone, it has turned sour, close to vinegar. Imoh says he can smell it from far, and that selling turned wine at Ekpri Nsukara market is the fastest way to lose your regular customers forever. "One time I tried to keep a batch for two extra days," he says. "I thought that if I kept it cool it would last. It did not last. It even spoiled worse than the normal way, because once it starts, waiting only carries it further." © Wikimedia Commons | Palm tappers often go to considerable personal risk to get the sap they require. That instability is not folklore, it is chemistry moving on a clock measured in hours rather than years, acetic acid bacteria taking over a live culture the moment it leaves the tree. It is also, oddly, the exact thing the natural wine world has spent the last decade paying a premium for. For years almost nobody bought Josko Gravner's or Stanko Radikon's wine in the Colli Goriziano hills along the Italian-Slovenian border, and critics who tasted their extended skin contact whites largely hated them. What changed was not the wine. It was that the natural wine movement found them, sommeliers started talking about them, and the style, now carrying a name British wine merchant David Harvey had coined in 2004 while working around a cellar on Sicily's Etna, became by 2015 a fixture on wine lists from New York to Tokyo. Orange wine did not build a market by becoming easier to make or more stable to ship. It built one because critics developed language for it, and that language let buyers anchor a price to something other than guesswork. Palm wine has had no equivalent moment, though not for lack of people trying. In a small shed off Ikot Ekpene Road, a man they call Umoh Bassey is attempting to make it sit still anyway. He runs what he calls a stabilization trial, three plastic drums fitted with makeshift airlocks, a thermometer taped to the side of each one. He has tried pasteurizing it twice. Both times the taste came out flat, the way boiled palm wine always tastes; like it is begging pardon for something. Cold filtration equipment costs more than he expects to earn back in two years of local sales, and no clear buyer waits at the end of that money, only the idea of one. None of that solves the timeline on its own. A bottle does not stop the fermentation. It only hides it, since the live culture that turns sap into vinegar does not care whether it sits in a gourd or under a cap. Pasteurization is aimed directly at that problem. Heat kills the culture instead of trying to outrun it. What nobody – not Umoh Bassey, not the attempts before him – has published is a verified number for how long a pasteurized bottle actually holds once it leaves the drum. The industry that would need that number does not exist yet to ask for it. A buyer outside the country will need to trust that it will not make them sick, before anything else, he says. Nobody wants to explain stomach trouble to a customer 6000 miles away. He has never priced a bottle against anything on a shelf, because no shelf has ever been there before. "If I send a bottle to London, and it costs what wine costs there, will they believe it is the same drink?" he asks, not expecting an answer. "Because for me, what is inside that bottle already, it is not the same drink again." He is not the first to try. A Nigerian entrepreneur named Daniella Ekwueme founded a company called Pamii in 2017 to solve the same instability problem at slightly larger scale, bottling a pasteurized version at a fixed 4 percent alcohol content after watching palm wine served at Lagos and Abuja gatherings turn sour more often than not. Her public activity had gone quiet within a few years of launch. The technical solution to instability is not a mystery, feasibility studies for pasteurization and bottling circulate widely in Nigerian small-business literature, complete with equipment lists and projected output running into tens of thousands of cartons. What has not happened, for Umoh Bassey or Pamii before him, is the second half of what orange wine got for free: a critical and commercial language that would let a buyer outside Lagos or Abuja know what a good bottle is worth and why. Imoh has heard of people trying to bottle it, sending it abroad the way garri and stockfish travel in suitcases to London, to Houston. His doubt sounds more like tiredness than rejection. Ukod does not want to sit down in one place, he says, using the Ibibio word for the wine itself. "That is how it is," he says. "If you stop it from moving, you have made another thing. Maybe that other thing is good too, I do not know. But it will not be this one again." Back at Use Offot, Imoh finishes his afternoon round and starts down the footpath with the day's last gourd against his hip. The mist has burned off. The heat sits heavy over the palms behind him. He does not look back at the trees. He walks the path he has walked every day for as long as anyone in his compound can remember, one hand steadying the gourd, the other swinging loose, already thinking about tomorrow's first cut, and whether the tree near Anua will be ready by then, or whether it needs one more day to build back what today already took from it.