What the Chinese will eventually do with palm wine will be amazing. They probably haven’t tasted it yet.
Once they do, they will grow forests of enhanced varieties of palm trees specifically for palm wine production.
And their palm wine will be exported as different flavours of organic drink with exotic labels, sold off the shelves of European and American marts.
Seeing a keg of good, fresh palm wine to buy in our Igbo villages nowadays is getting increasingly difficult as more and more tappers are leaving the face of the earth without having willing successors.
Part of the reason there are no ready successors is because, ever since the discovery of palm wine, the process of tapping it from the tree has remained basically the same laborious technique of climbing tall palm trees to nick holes in their shoulders to which gourds are fixed and harvested later.
Sometimes, a palm tree is hacked down with the singular intention to tap wine off it. This technique is a terminal process; you can say that the palm tree was tapped to d3ath.
There hasn’t been any improvement in the technique of tapping nor in the variety of wine trees. There are hardly any known practices among the tappers for enhancing wine production. Besides, packaging has remained crude.
Yet, palm wine remains the least harmful alcoholic drink closest to nature!
