AN afternoon jaunt to Jampang, Argao, Cebu, brimmed with toasts of coconut wine, or tuba, and drops of tuba lore.
Reminds you of Pilemon, a rhyme singing about a fisherman who catches tambasakan, or mudskippers. He sells them at a rickety market for a few Japanese occupation money known as kura.
His song played again when the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (Rafi) gave a bunch of writers, teachers and tourism-oriented workers a heritage tour to that mountain barangay to revisit Pilemon’s old haunt.
Jampang has been producing tuba for at least three generations, making this nook a good source of top-grade tuba, wine from the sap of unopened coconut flowers.
To get there, you take the unpaved barangay road so lonely you welcome the coconut trees and liter-jugs of tuba in front of some houses along the way.
This is definitely tuba country devoted to the Philippines’ version of red wine.
Tuba, tinted with tungog, a kind of mangrove whose bark is used for dyeing, has a reddish yellow color when young.
As it ages, it turns to shades of burnt sienna and then burgundy. Mature tuba loses it sweetness and attains the dryness of the better red wines or rums you have tasted.
They used to be sold by a measure known as bol, probably from Bols Brandy, or Ball mason fruit jar. Today, they still call it bol even if other measuring cups are used by retailers.
Taken straight or tamed with cola, tuba is best at room temperature. Do be careful. It can hit hard even when buffered with sumsoman or tapas, such as grilled meat or seafood.
Some recipes call for tuba. Torta is a cake using bag-ong dawat (newly gathered tuba) for leavening.
Kinutil is eggnog made with tuba, fresh egg yolks and chocolate or orange cola. A fortifying drink, our grandparents forced it down our gullets when we were ill.
During drinking sessions (tagay; also to pour a drink; proffer something), people take their shot by rounds using one drinking glass for all.
A “gunner” (from gunner, a rank in artillery corps) takes charge of shot sizes.
Little do they know tagay was once part of a social ritual when local elders met to discuss community problems. They used two pieces of hungot (bowl made out of three-quarters of coconut shell) to pass around portions.
There is a plan to create an eco-museum tour in Jampang for tuba appreciation, lecture and marketing. It may assure the preservation of tuba technology and culture.
Jampang could be fashioned after California’s Napa Valley, famous for its wines and tourism. That’s a long way off yet. So far, Argao has the Pitlagong Festival honoring tuba.
Marlon Boo, a mananggeti (tuba gatherer, also humorously referred to as coconut pilot) described pitlagong as a bamboo stick with a tufted end used to remove lalog, or dregs, from the sugong.
The latter is a container made out of a section of a bamboo stem, the node of which serves as the base. Each day the mananggeti slices the terminal portion of the bulok, or unopened coconut flower, to induce sap flow, which drips into the sugong.
Once a tree is milked it cannot have fruits anymore, but will go on blooming.
Some trees, however, are left to bear fruits so the farmer can sell or use the fruits to plant new trees.
At the de los Reyes tuba farm, where Boo works, we slaked our thirst with sweet, new tuba. They turn out about 300 five-gallon jugs each week of frothy bag-ong dawat and bahal (tuba, two-day-old or more). Some are reserved for vinegar and heady bahalina, tuba aged many months and up to a year. Visitors can buy tuba and vinegar bottled in glass or plastic jugs.
Fermentation takes place in huge, plastic drums but in pre-plastic times, clay jars were used. Which goes to show the medium changes, but the substance remains the same good product—sweet, then heady as the days go by like love we can’t forget.
