MauiWine at ʻUlupalakua Ranch

The drive is half of it. From Kīhei you climb Highway 31 to Highway 37 and keep going past Kēōkea until the condos and the kiawe scrub are long behind you and the road is running through open pasture at around 1,800 feet, with the whole isthmus and both coastlines laid out below. Then a stand of enormous camphor and jacaranda trees appears on the left, and that is ʻUlupalakua.

The land has been a ranch since the 1850s, when James Makee bought it, planted sugar and called it Rose Ranch. King Kalākaua was a regular guest — fond enough of the place that a cottage was built here in the 1870s for his visits. That building is now the tasting room, which means you drink a flight in a small wooden house that was put up for a Hawaiian monarch. The ranch around it still runs cattle across roughly eighteen thousand acres.

The winery itself dates to 1974, when ranch owner C. Pardee Erdman and winemaker Emil Tedeschi planted vines on volcanic soil nobody else thought would take grapes. Vines need years, so while they waited they made wine out of the one crop Maui had in abundance: pineapple. That stopgap became the thing the winery is best known for, and the sparkling pineapple wine — made by the traditional method, second fermentation in the bottle — is still the bottle most visitors carry home. It was the first of its kind in Hawaiʻi.

The estate wines are the quieter surprise. Syrah, malbec, grenache, viognier and chenin blanc all come off the ʻUlupalakua vineyard, grown at an elevation and on a cinder-and-lava soil that produce something distinctly not Californian. Ask for the estate flight rather than the fruit-wine flight if you want to understand why anyone planted here.

Two practical notes before you set off. The tasting room is closed one day a week, and the winery warns that satellite navigation routes people incorrectly — follow Highway 37 through Kēōkea rather than whatever your phone suggests.