Oakland scientist mimics wine of West Africa in lab

Traditional palm isn’t feasible, so he processes plant materials

In an Oakland laboratory, a new winemaker is crafting what could possibly be California’s most unusual craft beverage. The drink is often a hazy, milky color, reminiscent in appearance of horchata. It tastes like sour tropical fruits, pleasantly sweet and lightly effervescent. The winemaker, Onye Ahanotu, categorizes it as wine, but it was not fermented from grapes.

What Ahanotu makes is a version of palm wine, a traditional drink in West Africa and other parts of the world. The Sonoma County native fell in love with palm wine in 2017 while visiting Imo state, Nigeria, where he watched locals climb palm trees with a machete to extract the plant’s sweet, fresh sap. He wanted to share its taste with a broader audience but soon realized that producing it on a commercial scale would have devastating environmental impacts, simi

lar to the massive deforestation caused by the palm oil industry.

So Ahanotu is creating palm wine without any actual palm. Instead, he uses processed plant materials that approximate the molecular composition of real palm, then tweaks them by adding sugars, acids, microbes and yeast. His fledgling operation, Ikenga Wines, is still in the R&D phase, but Ahanotu believes that his palm wines could be an important addition to the American wine landscape: not only a delicious, new-to-California beverage, but also a model for how to design drinks in a resource-scarce future.

Ahanotu sees himself as part of the same forward-thinking, biodesigned food movement that claims plant-based meat companies like Impossible Foods. His work also bears certain similarities to the San Francisco startup Endless West, which re-creates alcoholic beverages like wine, sake and whiskey in a laboratory. Ikenga differs from Endless West in a crucial way: Whereas the Endless West wine is created entirely from molecules, Ikenga wines actually do undergo an oldfashioned fermentation.

Palm wine is a tradition shared by communities in disparate parts of the world, from Africa to Asia to South America and the Caribbean. Ahanotu calls it “the biggest wine you’ve never heard of.”

In parts of Nigeria, where his father is from, palm wine is part of the fabric of everyday life. Tappers climb oil palm or date palm trees in the mornings, cutting open their fruit and attaching a vessel to collect the sap. The liquid is often consumed the same day, within a close radius of its collection.

The sugary substance begins to ferment on its own almost immediately. By the evening, according to Ahanotu, the morning’s sap may reach an alcohol level of around 4%; by the next day, about 5%. As it continues to ferment, it grows higher in alcohol, more acidic and less sweet, but if left too long it turns to vinegar.

This small-scale, local tapping method of palm-sap collection is generally considered sustainable. An alternative method, more worrisome for environmentalists — but, surely, more tempting to anyone trying to produce at commercial scale — is to fell an entire palm tree, then burn parts of it to release the sap.

“The taste is so difficult to describe — super fresh, overpoweringly sweet,” Ahanotu said. The charm of palm wine, to him, is its refreshing, thirst-quenching quality. On top of the ethical considerations of deforestation, that quality made commercialization difficult to envision. How would one preserve the freshness over a longer period of time and larger geographical expanse?

Yet that’s exactly the sort of question that Ahanotu, an engineer who was previously a research associate at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, loves trying to answer. He describes his primary interest as biodesign, using elements from nature to create material products. When he first set out to make palm wine, he tried preserving the just-fermented sap with conventional stabilizers used in grape wine such as sulfur dioxide. But he wasn’t thrilled with the results, and the idea of importing so much palm sap from West Africa didn’t feel sustainable.

After spending half a year looking at vials of palm sap under a microscope in Oakland, Ahanotu had a revelation: Maybe he didn’t need the palm at all.

Ahanotu is secretive about his recipes, disclosing only that he sources “extracted and processed plant materials” from within the U.S. From those ingredients, he said, he creates “a reconstituted palm sap.” That’s the equivalent of crushed grapes in a typical California winery. Then he begins the fermentation by adding yeast and microbes that, he said, are indigenous to West Africa — he isolated them from plant material himself.

He usually doctors the raw ingredients by adding acid to balance out the sweetness. Then he bottles the wine while it’s still fermenting, thereby trapping carbon dioxide — a byproduct of alcoholic fermentation — inside, giving the wine a gentle fizz. Drinkers of grape wines may know this as the ancestral method; it’s how you make petnat.

The goal is not to exactly replicate what palm wine would taste like the same day it’s harvested in Nigeria. For one thing, the traditional wines are not sparkling. They’re also much lower in alcohol than the Ikenga products, which clock in around 10%-13% alcohol by volume, similar to a typical grape wine.

“My wines also have a stronger, more pungent flavor,” he said. When he has offered his creations to people familiar with traditional West African palm wine, Ahanotu said, “they say it reminds them of conventional palm wine, but it’s not the same thing.”

Ikenga is not yet licensed as an alcohol producer, and so far it’s received funding only from Ahanotu’s family and friends. While he raises capital and continues perfecting his recipes, he hosts periodic pop-up events where he pours his experiments (for free) and tries to elicit feedback. Those pop-ups have taken place at a biodesign conference in New York, a fashion event with Black designers in Los Angeles and a cellular agriculture conference. The most recent event took place in October at a private home in Berkeley, where he poured his wines alongside egusi soup, a West African dish with melon seeds and smoked shrimp; lamb bacon-wrapped okra; and mushroom fried rice topped with yaji, a Nigerian spice blend. His next pop-up will take place in San Francisco in December, and he expects it to be his largest yet, with a DJ and more elaborate food pairings.

What the Ikenga Wines lineup will look like when Ahanotu eventually formally launches is still unclear. The three prototypes I tasted each had its own personality. One, which he calls 23E, had a chalky texture and a yeasty aroma, with a lightly tropical flavor that reminded me of guava. The 18C was sweeter and its bubbles more intense, with a candied note that I associated with Runts; Ahanotu said it reminded him of the Nigerian fruit soursop.

Maybe the most interesting of all was 12C, which looked like aged Champagne in the glass: golden, with a thick layer of foam when it’s just poured. It was the driest and the most savory of the three, with less of an acidic punch. Thanks to its distinctively nutty, toasted-rice flavor, the closest analogue in my taste memory for it was sake.

I could easily imagine these drinks finding a receptive audience in the Bay Area, where, incidentally, sake is booming at trendy restaurants. They have the fizzy, easy-drinking vibe of a beer, the earthiness of a farmhouse cider and the subtlety required to pair well with strongflavored foods. Of all the fermented beverages we consume, in fact, grape wine may be the least helpful comparison.

Yet Ahanotu knows he’ll continue to be grouped with grape wine as long as he calls his product palm wine, and he’s comfortable with the confusion that may arise.

“People have already been asking me: Is this a natural wine?” he laughed. “Well, it’s all natural products in the ingredients. There’s no sulfites. But this is high intervention.”

In other words, it’s a category all its own.

“The taste (of real

palm wine) is so difficult to describe —

super fresh, overpoweringly

sweet.” Winemaker Onye Ahanotu

Photos by Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle Onye Ahanotu, winemaker of Ikenga Wines, works at Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs re-creating palm wine inspired by Nigerian tradition. He starts with processed plant materials that approximate the molecular composition of real palm.

Ahanotu cradles a glass of his wine. So far, the delicacy is in the R&D stage and approximates the taste of the real thing.

Photos by Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle Onye Ahanotu of Ikenga Wines pours a bottle of the wine he made at Counter Culture Labs. The original palm wine is crafted in small batches often consumed on the day it’s made.

Ahanotu pours a test wine batch into agar plates that will grow microbes he’ll use to begin the fermentation.