Lava Tubes and Cork Trees: Inside Volcano Winery

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest 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. Let’s start the adventure. Our featured winery in this episode.We find out America’s Southern Most Winery. Do you have a guess? Let me give you a hint. Aloha. Oh, you guessed it’s Volcano Hawaii is where we venture to.My name’s Kendall. And I’m the assistant manager and my 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’ll 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.Now, what is also a cork tree?So it’s a cork tree, but it’s harvested. You harvest cork from it. So the outer layer of the tree is how you harvest the cork. And it regenerates every seven years.And that’s what you used to cork up the wine, as you know, cork says, what we up in that bottle. They 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 tours in the backdrop. You’ll see Mauna Loa volcano on the left and Monacan volcano on the right. And then we’re heavily forested up in this area.We have tons of native forests and lava tubes on the property here. Lava tube? What is that?The volcano system 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 two miles from the national park entrance. So a lot of the time, we have customers that are hiking during the day, and then they come to 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 by little wine.Right. It’s sort of that mountain. That volcano doesn’t look so big when they’re taking it.Yeah. In reality, those are the two biggest mountains in the world. If we measure them from under the ocean to the tippy, tippy top of those mountains, taller than Mt. Everest. Yeah. Wow. So I was reading on the Web site 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 great varietals here, and we’ve narrowed it down to four varietals that work well for our microclimate here in the volcano. And those would include a great cold symphony, and symphony is a hybrid. UC Davis, California, actually created this grape in the 40s by doing a cross of the Mascotte grapes and the Grenache grape. So it’s kind of a cedar white grape. And we tried to blend it through a lot of our wine since it’s the main grapes that we’re producing here. We also do a grape called Cayuse Awaits. And that was created at