Vintner Aaliyah Nitoto seals a wine bottle with a cork at Free Range Flower Winery in Livermore.

Aaliyah Nitoto makes wine, but not from grapes.

Instead, the Oakland winemaker ferments California-grown flowers such as 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. (They do not, however, taste like soap or perfume.)

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 small and large, from San Francisco’s Canyon Market to the national chain Total Wine. 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, out of more than 12,500 applicants, of a $10,000 Sage Invest in Progress Grant for Black female entrepreneurs. Last fall, she opened a tasting room in Livermore, where she holds lively parties for wine club members. These days, she’s going through inventory quickly: She’d been sold out of her wines for months when she bottled a new batch on June 25.

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.

Aaliyah Nitoto holds a glass of her Marigold wine at Free Range Flower Winery in Livermore. Nitoto makes small batches of wine from local flowers.

Nitoto stumbled upon the idea while reading “The Way of Herbs,” a book by Michael Tierra about herbalism’s health benefits. She’d been interested in wine for a long time, though attempts to land a winery internship during college were unsuccessful. A brief, two-sentence 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,” Nitoto said. 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 said, with lavender. It would take a decade of homespun experimentation before Nitoto formally began her business.

Marigold is one of the wines Nitoto has been making commercially from fermented flowers instead of grapes.

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% 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. On walks in Oakland, she started noticing pineapple guava flowers, whose pink stamens “look like little fireworks,” she said, and she ended up making a batch of wine with flowers she’d picked by hand from a co-worker’s backyard tree. Nitoto’s next experiment is with red clover, a flower she used to munch on as a child growing up in Rhode Island.

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 go only so far. Ultimately, these drinks defy the neat categories of grape wines; they’re sui generis.

A glass of Marigold from Free Range Flower Winery. It tastes savory and herbaceous.

Take marigold. The aged-Chardonnay 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.

Oakland winemaker Aaliyah Nitoto bottles her wine at Free Range Flower Winery in Livermore.

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 tealike, 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.

Drinkers who have never tried flower wines might wonder whether they taste like some of the cloyingly floral food products that have become popular recently, like rosewater desserts and lavender lattes. Flowers are always delightful to smell, but not always to taste.

Nitoto’s wines avoid these pitfalls. She’s careful to make sure they don’t recall soap or your grandmother’s bathroom. “You have to be really precise in how you’re using the flowers,” she said. She doesn’t work with some blooms, like geraniums, that veer too perfumy.

It’s a fine line to walk: making wines that don’t taste too flowery but still taste like flowers.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley

Free Range Flower Winery: Tasting room open noon-5 p.m. most Saturdays and Sundays. Reservations recommended. 2271 S. Vasco Road, Unit B-C, Livermore (inside Longevity Wines). freerangeflowerwinery.com

Senior wine critic Esther Mobley joined The Chronicle in 2015 to cover California wine, beer and spirits. Previously she was an assistant editor at Wine Spectator magazine in New York, and has worked harvests at wineries in Napa Valley and Argentina.