Wine palm

The Essence

"Attalea butyracea is one of the most useful and conspicuous palms of the lowland Neotropics, ranging from southern Mexico to Bolivia and Trinidad-Tobago, mostly below 300 m elevation. A massive, solitary canopy palm, it carries a 'shuttlecock' crown of huge arching leaves atop a trunk that can reach 25 m. People use nearly every part: the sap is fermented into an alcoholic drink — hence 'wine palm' — and the buttery, oil-rich seeds yield an edible oil, behind both the name 'American oil palm' and the epithet butyracea. The leaves make a prized thatch lasting four years or more; the mildly sweet, nutty fruits are eaten raw and fed to cattle and pigs; the palm heart is eaten, beetle larvae are harvested from decaying trunks, and the roots are used in folk extracts for hepatitis. The species also has a notorious medical-ecology role: in Colombia its crowns are the wild biotope most often found infested by triatomine bugs, among them Rhodnius prolixus, one of the main vectors of Chagas disease — a floodplain-forest study in Casanare, Colombia found 88.9% of palms infested, at about 12.6 bugs per palm, and palms near houses are a documented risk factor for infected bugs migrating into homes."

The species was first described as Cocos butyracea by Mutis ex Linnaeus f. in Supplementum Plantarum (1782); the current combination Attalea butyracea (Mutis ex L.f.) Wess.Boer was published in Pittieria in 1988. Its long synonymy — Cocos butyracea, Scheelea butyracea, Attalea gomphococca, A. humboldtiana, A. wallisii and others — reflects repeated reclassification between Cocos, Scheelea and Attalea.