California winemaker uses flowers — instead of grapes
Aaliyah Nitoto makes wine, but not from grapes.
Instead, the Oakland winemaker ferments Californiagrown flowers like lavender, marigold, hibiscus and rose. The finished products from her Free Range Flower Winery look like grape wine and clock in at a similar alcohol level — but they taste like something wholly their own.
Nitoto is the only person making commercial flower wine in California to her knowledge, and since launching her business in 2018, she’s quietly amassed a following in the Bay Area. Her bottles can be found at wine shops there, as well as on Vinoshipper.com. Free Range Flower even made a cameo in the NBC sitcom “Grand Crew.”
After years of running the winery on a shoestring budget — Nitoto still has a day job, in health care — Free Range Flower is maturing. In March, Nitoto was one of 35 recipients of a $10,000 grant for Black women entrepreneurs.
Still, as the business grows, Nitoto finds herself having to explain to customers that making flower wine isn’t some newfangled innovation, as many assume.
Nitoto stumbled upon the idea while reading “The Way of Herbs,” a book by Michael Tierra about herbalism’s health benefits. A brief, twosentence passage in the book about flower wines piqued her interest.
That set her off on a research quest. “I found this whole history of women making wine with flowers, and I just kind of fell down that rabbit hole,” says Nitoto. She read about creations from the chrysanthemum wines made during China’s Han Dynasty to the dandelion wines of Colonial America.
She found a simple recipe and, in 2008, made her first batch “in a pot in my closet,” she says, with lavender. It would take a decade of homespun experimentation before Nitoto formally launched her business.
To make her wines, Nitoto starts with flower petals — sometimes fresh, sometimes dried — and macerates them in water before beginning the fermentation. Flowers contain a starch that can be fermented into alcohol, but there’s not enough fermentable material to result in a wine of, say, 11 to 14 percent alcohol, the range of most grape wines. So she needs to add another fermentable sugar source. That can be actual sugar, though Nitoto also uses citrus juice, which has the additional benefit of acidity.
While Nitoto purchases the petals for her three main wines — marigold, lavender and rose-hibiscus — from distributors, she experiments with foraged blooms, too.
It’s natural to reach for familiar analogues when describing these creations. Nitoto tends to describe her marigold wine, for example, as tasting like an aged chardonnay. But the comparisons only go so far. Ultimately, these drinks defy the neat categories of grape wines; they’re sui generis.
Take marigold. The agedchardonnay comparison is apt insofar as the wine is a deep golden color with some oxidative notes that you might expect to find in an older vintage, and a citrusy burst that comes from the lemon juice Nitoto adds. Much more than chardonnay, however, it smells like marigolds, as evocative as if you were standing in a flower field. It’s savory and herbaceous, recalling thyme and sea salt. A better grape-wine benchmark could be sherry, the Spanish fortified wine known for capturing the briny quality of the Mediterranean Sea.
If there’s an analogue for Nitoto’s RoseHybiscus, it might be a carbonic pinot noir. The wine is a vibrant, translucent magenta color, exploding with juicy flavors of sour cherry, cranberry and orange (another citrus addition), along with the sorts of flavors one might expect from an oak barrel, like sandalwood and vanilla, despite the wine never having touched oak. This one has some tannin from the flower petals, making it taste even more vinous, though the texture here feels softer, more tea-like, than pinot noir.
Coming up with a parallel for lavender, Nitoto’s original creation — and, she admits, her favorite — is trickier. This one is sharp, herbal, assertively floral. It tastes like anise, juniper and the bittersweet flavor of lemon rind, all amplified by bubbly carbonation. There is something vermouth — or amaro-like about lavender, with its complex botanical profile and that resounding, refreshing bitterness. Those who seek out the extreme herbal flavors of hoppy IPAs would find something to love here as well.