Sweet science made this Muntinlupa wine business thrive

Posted at 6:27 pm December 12, 2011

Tags: Alcoholic Beverages, Beverages

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by Alexander Villafania

MUNTINLUPA CITY, METRO MANILA – Luke Macababbad set up a private apiary (bee farm) withthe sole purpose of serving honey for him and his family and eventually their neighbors and friends.

But because the honeybees were very active – they owned four colonies, each one composed of several thousand honeybees – the family now had more honey that they could consume.

Selling became an option but it wasn’t until Luke’s father-in-law, a local winemaker, convinced him to start making honey wine, which is more popularly known as mead.

And so in the next four years, he and his his father-in-law set out to create a unique blend of wine that uses honey. In 2005, after much research and development, testing and tasting, the results satisfied them and so Dielle’s Apiary and Meadery was born.

So far, the company is producing at least 2,000 bottles of wine every month, most of it aged for 14 months. They also have premium wine that have been aged for five years.

Luke points out that mead is not always known in the Philippines though he stressed that Filipinos should love how it tastes as it is soft in the palate yet still gives a good alcoholic kick.

He dreams of making the Philippines well known for making wines, amid the fact that most Filipinos think of wine as imported from either the US or Australia.

The company also relied on science to pursue their endeavors. The company became one of the recipients of the Small Enterprise Technology Upgrading Program (SETUP), a project by the Department of Science and Technology (DoST) that aims to provide financial and technological assistance to entrepreneurs.

In the case of Dielle, DoST provided stainless steel aging tanks, manufacturing plant layout and design, package and labeling designs, as well as training on apiary maintenance.

Due to the intervention of the DoST, their production increased. For instance, their production process improved honey wine production, which increased by as much as 159 percent. The company also was able to target several new markets in Laguna, as well as opened an online buying site for foreign markets.

“We hope more Filipinos would learn about wine making in the Philippines. Hopefully, we can also export and show how adept we are in this industry,” Luke says.

Get more information on Dielle’s Apiary and Meadery

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