Productions: Island Beat

Panoscope . Media Briefings . Island Beat . Our Own Voice . Le P'tit Nouvelliste
Order Publications

Island Beat Articles Index

Turning Biodiversity into Wine in St. Lucia
July 2003

By Vincent Lewis, CERN correspondent, St. Lucia

English français español kreyol

Along the east coast of St. Lucia, in the quiet little community of Cannelles - the Kweyol word for "cinnamon" - a 66-year-old man has developed a formula to turn local fruits into smooth-tasting wine.

Charles Louis, veteran vintner of 25 years, has turned his love of biodiversity into a flourishing business. St. Lucia has everything it needs to sustain a thriving wine business, says Louis. "We live in an island that is very rich in fruits and we don't know much about them. Tourists say the wine that I make does not exist anywhere except in the island of St. Lucia."

His wine flavours are sugarcane, banana, mango and guava. He is currently experimenting with cashew nut wine.

Louis needs about 3 pounds of fruit to make a gallon of wine. That would be about 3,000 pounds of fruits for 100 gallon of wine. The residue of such a large amount of fruit could be dried up and sold as animal feed, says Louis. As he has done for more than 2 decades, Charles Lewis ferments, bottles and sells his wine from his humble abode at Cannelles, 10 minutes drive from the Hewanorra International Airport.

He has just submitted a proposal to the St. Lucia National Economic Council to establish a local winery. And he has some advice for the government. "If the government were to go into wine production, the first thing I would recommend is that it finds its own source of water".

The taste of wine depends on the type of water used in production, says Louis. He recommends spring water because pipe-borne water affects the taste of wine. "If the pipe-borne gets into wine," he notes, "you will not know what wine you make and this is important because the key of this wine business is flavour."

Louis has been experimenting on ways of improving his trade for long. He invented his own wooden cane juice mill, which won a BBC prize for new inventions in 1979, the year St. Lucia earned its independence from Britain. He has yet to collect the prize. However, with the prospect of winemaking becoming a booming business in St. Lucia, Louis is considering doing something about his prize.

"Sometime last year, I spoke to a lawyer who told me that the prize which is more than 20 years old is not lost," he says. "What I can do is have a lawyer write to them and see if I can collect it." Louis says he has been advised to form a company. He is giving this some serious thoughts. If he gets a patent for the mill he developed more than two decades ago, he could be smiling to the banks.

For now, Louis hopes that the authorities will give him the chance to pass on his winemaking skills to St. Lucians, and to assist to generate the much-needed foreign exchange for country. He also hopes his initiative will permeate the society and encourage more St. Lucians to get into the business of winemaking.

This article is based on a transcription of Island Beat Radio.

Island Beat Articles Index