Leleshwa is Kenya’s first home spun commercial wine brand. The vineyards from where Leleshwa is made are in Naivasha’s Morendat Farm. It is a 40-hectare affair that began in 1993 when billionaire businessman Pius Ngugi decided to venture into wine making. Morendat Farm is part of Ngugi’s Kenya Nut Company stable. Just so you know, Kenya Nut Company is Kenya’s biggest nut export in a market where there are only less than 300 nut players in the world. Kenya Nut Company — that has cornered 10 percent of the world’s nut market — is in the top five best nut concerns globally. Out of Africa is Kenya Nut’s flagship export from nuts grown in its 8,000 acre farm.
READ ALSO: This dairy farmer owned the whole of Muthaiga
Kenya Nut Company is in turn the holding arm of Pius Ngugi’s Thika Coffee Mills and Rift Valley Winery in the Morendat Farm nestled on the ankles of Mt Longonot. It is there where the finest 60,000 bottles of cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Rose wines are made, annually.
That is 59,000 litres of wine!
Morendat is one of the few vineyards in the world bestriding the equator. Colombia, drug cartels and all, is the other country with vineyards along the Equator. For beer lovers who did not know, our lagers taste as they do because they are brewed from tropical barley grown along the Equator.
READ MORE
6 suspects in court in connection to Sh2.85 billion gold scam
READ ALSO: Does your account read Sh100 million? This is where the rich live in Kisumu, Mombasa, Eldoret
To maintain quality despite the obvious advantage, Pius Ngugi (who came into the limelight via that child support court tiff with Esther Passaris) sourced James Farquharson, a South African viticulturist and pro winemaker to take charge. Did you know that Nairobi’s upmarket Kileleshwa suburb has its name fleshed from Leleshwa, a Maasai word for a tree dominant in Naivasha? And that there are no supermarkets in Kileleshwa!
