Drop by at any souvenir shops in Baguio and you will surely notice the wine bottles in different colors and sizes lined in the shelves. But do you know that those commercial wines, even the tapey, are prepared in what I considered as "modern and commercial" way. For sure, if those wines were made in the traditional means, they will be sold at a much higher price.Modern wine making normally uses commercial yeasts available in the market; the traditional method utilizes "bobod", a yeast prepared traditionally (again!) For commercial production, the main ingredients were liquefied prior to fermentation, which is not the
case if you want to make a genuine Igorot wine. As for the taste, the commercial and home-made tapey taste almost the same but still, nothing can beat the richer flavor of what has been prepared the original process.
Here's another fact, not all of the ingredients are native to Cordillera. While strawberry is in the
backyard of the wine makers in La Trinidad (capital town of Benguet) and bugnay (a red, sweet-sour berry) is now cultivated in the region, other wine main component are from the neighboring Ilocos and Cagayan regions. Duhat (black plum or java plum) is available in the Cordillera but most of the supply comes from the lowland provinces of La Union and Ilocos. Yakon is sourced out from Nueva Vizcaya.
