(Roadsandkingdoms) - The driver was showing me around his village when he first mentioned it. He pointed at a young Mayan child pulling up carrots and handing them to an older boy who was putting them in a bag for storage, “They’re going to make carrot wine out of those.” I asked for details—or even better, a taste. “They haven’t made it yet,” he said, laughing. “The only thing that’s ready right now is cashew wine.”

They didn’t have many stores in the Mayan village set into the pine-covered mountains of Belize, just a tiny shop stocked with basic groceries and household supplies and a tortilleria selling warm corn tortillas out of a cut-out window a few hours each day. But my driver, Calbert, was sure he could find cashew wine elsewhere.

A few days later we were bumping along the dusty road that wind through the Cayo district in western Belize when Calbert told me that he had asked around his village about cashew wine. He found out that they were selling it at the gas station a few miles down the road. Of course, everything in Cayo is a few miles down the road and it usually takes an hour or two to get there because the dirt roads require careful maneuvering, especially after a rainstorm. “It’s like black ice,” said Francisco, a guide from San Ignacio. While he had never seen black ice in person—or snow, for that matter—he had seen it on TV and thought it was an apt comparison. “I watch Ice Road Truckers and the way they have to move their steering wheel back and forth while the wheels slide—it’s just like that.”

I still wanted to try the wine and since Calbert apparently had nothing better to do, we set out to find the gas station. An hour later, we arrived at the sun-bleached Superstar gas station that sat along the paved highway that lead to Belize City. Inside, the gas station looked like a typical truck stop. The back shelf was lined with liquor; there were tiny bottles of blackberry wine bitters made with palo de hombre (go ahead and Google that), soursop liqueur, craboo wine, locally-made one-barrel rums, Belikin beers, and, at last, cashew wine.

Cashew wine is not made from the cashew nut that sits alongside craisins and coconut flakes in a bag of trail mix. Instead, it’s made from the cashew fruit, which is sometimes called a cashew apple (adding to the confusion, the cashew nut is not actually a nut, but a seed, so basically, what we’ve been eating all these years is a roasted, salted lie).