The astonishing growth in consumption and production of wine in this last decade has encouraged the art of winemaking in the strangest places. It had been generally conceded that the very best wine can only be produced in Mediterranean type micro-climates. Yet today you will find vineyards from Iceland to Peru, some producing quite decent products.
 One of the last places you might find a vintner is in the only sub-tropical region of the continental United States in the far south of Miami-Dade County. In fact, this is the southernmost winery in the U.S.A. - the Schnebly Winery, located a few miles from the edge of the Everglades National Park in what is called locally as the Redlands.
The winery is a creation of Peter and Denisse Schnebly. They own 96 acres and lease an additional 150 acres for their annual harvest. As Peter explained: It is not hard to make wine. It's just hard to make good wine. Over the course of the first seven months we made a couple of good wines and we made a lot of bad wines.
 Now the secret is out. This is not your common or garden grape wine. This is actual wine made with tropical fruits. Carambola (star fruit), mango, passion fruit and lychee are presently utilized for the process. Compared to grapes, tropical fruits possess less sweetness as well as less acidity. The Schneblys add sugar and tartaric crystals to create wines that have an appealing, sweet flavor and a crispness that consumers traditionally expect from the beverage.
The wines are remarkably good. If you were not to know what you were drinking, you would indeed note a difference, but you would probably be unable to place exactly what it is you taste. I’m sure the last thing that would come to mind is passion fruit and mango.
Allen Susser, head chef and proprietor of Chef Allen's in Miami, believes the Schneblys are making more than a novelty wine. Besides selling their mango and passion fruit wines at his restaurant, which serves New World cuisine, Susser also likes to cook with them.
 We purchase a bottle of carambola and passion fruit to try on our friends. We know they are not great wine connoisseurs, and also that they are very polite, but to our surprise they unsuspectingly congratulate us on our excellent choice of wine. On showing them the bottles, all are pleasantly taken aback at what they had been drinking. Only one of our guests suspected that there was something different about the wines, but he admitted that he just couldn’t substantiate his feeling.
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