Local businessman turns hobby into winery
Belize will never be mistaken for France, California, Chile, Australia or any other major wine producing nation, but if one businessman has his way, the “made in Belize” label on his local creations will at least be greeted with respect. News Five’s Janelle Chanona reports.
Mervin Skeen, Bel-Mer Winery
“I think this is like a passion, wine for me is a passion. Right now I’m not working; I’m just enjoying life.”
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
Most people might associate Mervin Skeen with adult entertainment, but last year he sold his nightclub and turned his hobby into a business.
Mervin Skeen
“I don’t want it to be just a Belizean wine, I want it to be an international wine, a wine anybody could drink, appreciate, and could say, Wow! This is a truly nice product, this is a genuine product.”
According to Skeen, for the past three decades he’s been learning the finer points of winemaking. Eight months ago he constructed his winery and tasting room at mile twelve and a half on the Western Highway and started mass producing Bel-Mer wines using a wide variety of local fruit.
Mervin Skeen
“We want the fruit when it’s very, very ripe. So at that time because of being very, very ripe, the only next thing to do with it if you can’t sell it is just throw it away. So rather than throw it away they sell it to us so we get it at a very inexpensive price.”
After the fruit is washed and prepped, it goes into the fermentor.
Mervin Skeen
“This here, we doing here pineapple, so basically this is pineapple fermenting. This would stay like this for ten days. After ten days we take it and transfer it to other tanks.”
“Everything’s got to be closed at that time, you can’t expose it. Like this, you can expose it to air, you cannot do that with this. That’s why when you we the primary fermentation an aerobic fermentation, this one is an anaerobic fermentation, no air, you close it, you lock it off.”
“After this settles now and fermentation stops completely, then that’s the time when you do what you want to do, fining, filtration and what not. When we do filtration we use, this machine looks simple, but it’s very innovative.”
“You got to be careful because when you filter, you have to remember if you filter too fine then you are taking some fruits, you are taking out esters and you taking out some bouquet and you taking out some other things, so you have to know what you are doing to filter it just right.”
From there, the wine is bottled, labelled, and stored for a year before it goes on sale. So far Skeen has produced cashew, ginger, pineapple, blackberry, and Malay Apple wines. Plans are already in gear to start using sorrel next month.
Mervin Skeen
“We have a semi-dry pineapple and a sweet pineapple. That’s the only wine I made in a semi-dry and a sweet. All of our other wines, I made them to conform to a semi-dry taste. You know, all in semi-dry. And we also make all our wines to taste like something people know already internationally. And I’ll give you an example. Like the blackberry, we make the blackberry to taste like a French Beaujolais Nouveau where it has that nice berry like taste it has good tannin in it, it has certain about of structure, a little sweetness.”
“We want them to taste our product and see what it’s like because we know that the taste is in the pudding, if you taste it, you like it, we’re going to sell our wines.”
A visit to the winery also includes etiquette on wine sampling, starting with the proper way to handle the glass.
Mervin Skeen
“People hold it any way they chose to, but I would like to put two of my fingers on the bottom and then I have three of my fingers with the thumb single out and this gives you a lot of leverage as far as swirling your wine, how you want to swirl it. You just swirl the wine, you smell it, and before you taste it also you might want to look at the colour and what we do you use a white background, a white table cloth usually, so you look at the wine. That gives you an indication of the wine, if the wine might be too old, it’s oxidized and that sort of thing. And after you’ve done that then you taste the wine, you swirl it around in your mouth and that’s so the wine could cover all the areas in your mouth.”
And Skeen is hoping one taste is all it will take to Bel-Mer Wines a national favourite. Reporting for News Five, I am Janelle Chanona.
Suggested retail price for Bel-Mer Wines is fourteen dollars a bottle. The winery and tasting room is open Monday to Saturday between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon.
