Tourists in eastern Nepal can purchase floral wine now. Sip at your own risk.
Pop bottles filled with rhododendron wine for sale in Basantapur Bazaar. Photo: Mukesh Pokhrel
Living in Louisville, KY, we’re not shocked to find out about alco-tourism. (Bourbon signage alone around here will make your eyelids droop.) But we did find staggering Mukesh Pokhrel’s report on rhododendron wine, the latest liquid souvenir of Nepal.
Pokhrel investigates a new controversy in the Tinjure-Milke-Jaljale, a region of Nepal’s east. The springtime profusion of rhododendron blooms there each year draws thousands of trekkers and, increasingly, drinkers.
Locals have been making medicine and wine too out of the abundant native rhododendron forever, and Nepalese law permits home production within limits. However, since tourism bounced back after COVID-19, winemaking for sale has taken off, albeit in folksy fashion.
“The products are typically sold in reused bottles of popular soft drinks with handwritten labels or no labels at all,” writes Pokhrel for Mongabay. “Shopkeepers said most buyers are domestic tourists from cities such as Kathmandu and Dharan, although Indian visitors from West Bengal and Assam states also buy the bottles as a souvenir linked to the flowering season.”
Who could begrudge people from making a few more rupees off flower wine? A couple of things make it questionable at least, and alarming at worst.
Nepal’s Tinjure-Milke-Jaljale region, known for its rhododendron forests and leopards
First, the ecological concern: It’s illegal for tourists to pick rhododendron, the national flower of Nepal. “Community forest groups have deployed forest guards and police personnel during peak bloom season (March-April),” Pokhrel reports. Pickers can be fined “up to 5,000 Nepali rupees ($37),” and 15 have already been apprehended this year.
However, at present there are no national regulations to protect this environment, home to snow leopards and red pandas as well. “The region has been managed largely through community forestry systems rather than a formal protected-area model,” Pokhrel explains, “giving significant stewardship responsibilities to local communities including Rai, Limbu, Sherpa and Tamang groups who have long depended on the forests for fuelwood, grazing and seasonal forest products.”
The wine-makers contend they’re only using blossoms from their own gardens, but as the scale of production keeps growing, that claim seems less and less believable.
So emerges a familiar tension, between local conservationists and local entrepreneurs (if you can call rhododendron-wine-makers that). As with strip-mining in the Appalachians, logging in the Amazon, or abalone harvesting in the Pacific Northwest, it arises wherever natural resources can be profitable.
Tourists flock to the region in April, when the rhododendron blooms. Photo: Mukesh Pokhrel
But tourism gives this tension a peculiar twist. As with the effect of human breath on the cave paintings of Altamira, every tourist inevitably degenerates the destination that set him voyaging. Dean MacCannell puts it more harshly: “Ruin is emblematic of all tourist attractions.”
One look at this photograph of a trekking path through a rhododendron forest in Sikkim says it.
Trekking in Sikkim, India, east of the Tinjure-Milke-Jaljale.
Photo: Barsey Rhododendron Trek
Public health is the other concern. There are nearly 30 species of rhododendron in this region, and some (Pokhrel mentions Rhododendron decorum specifically) contain known toxins. Since there’s no control over the wine production, nobody knows which plants have been bottled or what health risks they may pose.
Come to think of it, all forms of alcohol are toxic, whether you’ve traveling Napa vineyards, Dublin’s pubs, or the distilleries of Bardstown, Ky.
And typically, all tourists are thirsty, for experience and something more. A wise person once summed up the states of mind that make drinking toxins sound like a fine idea: H-A-L-T/Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. For a traveler with sore feet, far from home, an old Coke bottle filled with rhododendron wine could look awfully good.
Leave a Reply