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The World's Only Sparkling Palm Wine: Winemaker Tasting with Ikenga's Onye Ahanotu
Onye Ahanotu is far from your standard winemaker, and his stunning wines are from another world - more accurately, another time. Onye, with a background in science, art and design, bridges the 16,000+ year heritage of Nigerian palm wine with the bleeding edge of viticultural science at Ikenga Wines. As a category, Palm Wine is nearly impossible to find in the US, until now!
Leveraging his Harvard background in natural design and sustainability, Onye found a way to guide the unpredictable fermentation process to craft delicate and capricious elixirs. He elevated Palm Wine even further by applying the méthode ancestral to create a bottle-fermented sparkling palm wine - perhaps the first of its kind in history.
But why would a renaissance man with an elite educational lineage, abandon a promising career in science to make an esoteric wine? Because Onye is drawn to finding artistic solutions to complex problems, and creating Ikenga is about much more than doing the uncommon. While dining at an elevated Afro-Caribbean restaurant in DC, Onye surveyed the wine list only to find grape-based options. This wasn't the first (or last) time that it has happened but the cultural dissonance on the menu is a mirrored metaphor for the social dissonance in America. The deep history of his African heritage felt dismissed and replaced with a euro-centric definition of a ‘proper pairing’. There was, quite literally, no space for him on the menu.
Ikenga Wines is about creating that space by redrafting the cultural narrative in culinary prose. Through Ikenga Wines, Onye not only passes an ancient African tradition through his modern lens to create a new wine, he uses his significant artistic and intellectual prowess to explore the space within the category - a space that embraces drinking differently.
Doors open at 5 PM, Onye will pour and discuss his wines in detail from 6-7 PM and hold an open pour and Q&A from 7-8 PM. Drop-ins welcome!
We hope to see you here!
