Hombolo · Dodoma · Tanzania
Our own ground, for the first time.
Hombolo sits just outside Dodoma, in Tanzania’s dry, red-soil centre — closer to the sun than any vineyard has a right to be.
We manage eight plots there, an acre each, more or less, inside the Hombolo irrigation scheme. Our rows sit in Section B and Section C.
Everything before this was made or found elsewhere and brought home. This is the first ground that’s actually ours.
Every plot is tended by hand — sprayed, pruned, watered, picked row by row. Nothing here is mechanized. Nothing here is fast.
Corn grows between some of the vine rows. Baobabs stand where they’ve stood for longer than anyone farming here today has been alive.
The first vines planted anywhere in Tanzania went into the ground here, at the Hombolo Catholic mission, in 1938. Two decades later, in 1957, an Italian Passionist priest named Irioneo Maggioni started a vineyard from three seedlings at Bihawana, a short drive from where our own vines are — it grew into the farm that became Dodoma’s wine industry. After independence, President Nyerere asked the missions to help expand it further.
One of the vines that came with those missionaries we still know by its Italian name: Ottavianello. It’s Cinsault under an alias — the same grape grown for generations around Ostuni in Puglia, DNA-identical to the Makutopora clone a few rows over. We can’t date exactly when ours arrived, but it almost certainly came the way vines first came to Dodoma at all. Two names, one grape, two migrations to the same red soil — it doesn’t stand alone in our cellar, but it’s part of how the Cinsault here came to be.
So when people ask why anyone would plant a vineyard in a Kenyan coffee farmer’s name at the edge of Dodoma — the honest answer is that this ground got there first.
Asis’s hero grape
Cinsault (Makutopora clone)
Block B · Hombolo, Dodoma · 2026
Cinsault has been Asis’s hero grape since the first bottle we ever made, in Darling. It’s the one we keep coming back to, the one that convinced us wine was worth taking seriously.
In Hombolo it’s a different animal entirely: the Makutopora clone, Dodoma’s own Cinsault, named for the sub-region it’s from — sun-toughened, thick-skinned, at home in heat that would flatten most red grapes. We picked this block in the first week of July. It’s resting in the cellar now, finding its shape. This is our first vintage of it — we don’t have a name for it beyond that yet, and we’re not going to invent one before it’s earned.
Chenin Blanc
Field blend · Hombolo, Dodoma · 2026
Someone, at some point, interplanted the white block with more than Chenin — small amounts of Sauvignon Blanc, and at least one small-berried, aromatic variety we haven’t identified yet.
Rather than sort it out, we’re picking and fermenting it as it grows. Consider this an open question we’re bottling.
We brought this fruit in over a few dry, bright days in July 2026 — crates on heads, crates on motorbikes, crates on the back of whatever had wheels that day.
Asis started as a small, private circle in Nairobi — three wines made or found elsewhere and carried home. Hombolo is the first ground we get to call our own.
