Dr Rowe’s fruitful experimentation

Dr Lennox Rowe enjoys experimenting with Jamaican fruits and herbs as a pastime, but he never anticipated that people in his community of Ballard’s Valley, St Elizabeth, would be so interested in the wine he produces from them.

Rowe, a 58-year-old physicist who firmly believes that it is important to “see the theory coming out in reality”, has meticulously constructed and designed the solar-powered structure on the land across from his home that he has named ‘The Vineyard’.

The former principal of Cornwall College said in a recent interview with The Gleaner that The Vineyard was designed to be a wine-tasting lounge where he could host small gatherings of friends and family and serve them his newly produced wines.

“The concept started out for it to be a little tree house,” he said, adding that his son had proposed chopping down the large mango tree that had remained there for many years and to use its stump as the building’s foundation.

However, this vision was quickly transformed and executed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 to function as his makeshift winery, given his developed passion for winemaking.

As he developed health challenges, Rowe began to utilise his education and skills to produce “healthy wines”.

“I’m a naturalist ... I have hypertension (high blood pressure), but I don’t take medication. I try to use natural things to [control] it. Wine is one of those things because some persons believe that alcohol is bad ... [but] it’s the abuse of alcohol that is bad. When I make wine, I make it anywhere between five and 15 per cent ABV (alcohol by volume), so the alcohol thins the blood ... and the blood flows freely,” he explained.

Organically grown

Rowe went on to say that all of the herbs he grows for his wine – which, basically, serves as a medicine – are organically grown.

Using a variety of fruits and plants, including star apple, lychee, blackcurrant, Guinea henweed, corn silk extract, pineapple aged in logwood, and cherries, Rowe produces both red and white wines that are made without preservatives.

The fruit wine aging process, he said, takes approximately three months.

“I will make wine out of any fruit, and I will age them in like orange peel [or] cinnamon, so you’re going to have the alcohol extract the flavonoids and terpenes from the fruit, so it’s in the wine, so it’s kind of healthy,” he said.

He stated that after trying his wines, several individuals expressed interest in buying a few bottles for themselves. Some have even sworn by its medicinal benefits.

“I have a lot of friends who will come and taste wine, and when people taste, they fall in love, and they will probably purchase a bottle or two, but it’s not that I am going into commercial,” he said.

The wines, he continued, are created to please the palates of all as he produces wines ranging from dry, to sweet, and to mildly sweetened, using cane sugar to sweeten to the preference of customers.

“I just put the science into action because winemaking is just an extension of anaerobic respiration,” he added.

Despite his grape arbour being wrecked by Hurricane Beryl in July, he has not let it stop him from continuing to follow his passion.

In the next five years or so, Rowe said that he sees The Vineyard being expanded and transformed into a multifunctional space that will foster community connections.

Even while he welcomes people from the wider community, he made sure to clarify that it is not a pub and that he is not encouraging people to come sit and consume alcohol.

The interior of The Vineyard was decorated and painted in Jamaican colours, this as Rowe confessed to being “very patriotic” and having visions of the location being a tourist attraction in the years to come.

In the meantime, he is currently constructing a wine cellar and a laboratory on The Vineyard’s first floor and has already furnished the area with a living area and restroom.

Rowe is a 34-year veteran educator who began his career at Hampton School in Malvern, St Elizabeth, where he taught physics and chemistry for five months before moving to The Bahamas, where he spent 26 years teaching chemistry, physics, biology, and mathematics.

Originally from the community of Mountainside, Rowe returned to Jamaica in 2016 as principal of Munro College, his alma mater, and later spent 18 months at Cornwall College.

In addition, Rowe is the father of three: two girls who work as nurses and a son who aspires to become a software engineer.

Currently, he is the senior education officer for the sciences at the Ministry of Education and Youth.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com