Once tasting coconut wine in HCMC

When the sunset comes, young people gather at Le Thi Rieng Park in HCMC’s District 10 to meet, to talk and to enjoy coconut wine, a specialty of the Mekong Delta’s Ben Tre Province.
Coconut wine is made from dried coconut fruit when the coconut shell becomes hard and the inner soft part becomes thin and hard too. Makers peel off the cover, make a hole on the fruit and pour out a part of its water.
Then they put into the fruit a kind of enamel and sticky rice and then close up the hole. After some days, the enamel reacts chemically with the coconut water, sticky rice and inner white cover and makes a type of wine called coconut wine.
A winemaker at Cong Thanh Coconut Winery said each coconut fruit included 200 mg/l acetaldehyde, 0.2 mg/l of lead and 5 mg/l of bronze. Mentioning coconut wine favor, Hoang Vu, an enthusiast, said, “Coconut wine has acidity and alcohol concentration like grape wine but it has the typical taste and fragrance of coconut. People are better to drink after freezing the wine.”
Wine attracts many people not only by its strange flavor but also by the shape of the bottle. Winemakers tie a dried grass string around the coconut fruit in an effort to decorate it as well as for people to carry it easily. Thank to its good-looking shape, locals often buy coconut wine as gifts for special holidays or New Year. For some tourists, they buy it as a souvenir.
The way of drinking is also attractive because drinkers drink through an aluminum pipe sticking into the coconut fruit. If tourists can not come to Ben Tre to enjoy coconut wine, they can come to Le Thi Rieng Park every afternoon. Each coconut wine fruit is priced at VND50,000 to VND60,000.