By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
Since her retirement in 2021 after 40 years as a learning specialist for special needs students, Woodstock’s Sharen Conner has devoted herself to her family farm and specifically to the revival of an age-old, traditional culinary and medicinal treasure — verjus, the non-alcoholic, tart, acidic juice pressed from unripe wine grapes.
Conner and her husband, Chris Raynolds, planted a one-acre vineyard consisting of 600 winter-hardy wine grapevines in 2009 and Conner eventually turned her hand to learning winemaking, strictly as a hobby, using conventional vintner’s methods before turning to an ancient technique known as pied de cuve or “foot of the barrel,” which utilizes yeasts naturally present on the grapes themselves to produce a wild fermentation. When the COVID pandemic hit and forced the shutdown of in-person classes and the substitution of on-line classes at Hanover High School, where Conner concluded her teaching career, the veteran educator decided to retire and dedicate herself to other pursuits.
Thus began in earnest the production of verjus as a commercial and retail product on a decidedly diminutive scale at the Conner and Raynolds homestead on Bridge Road, close by the historic Lincoln Covered Bridge in West Woodstock. “I was taught to cull the grapes at maturation and to just leave the best bunches for wine,” Conner recalled last weekend, looking back on the startup of verjus production at Lincoln Bridge Farms in 2019. “But I couldn’t bear to throw the culled grapes out, so I wondered, ‘What can I do with these grapes?’ A friend of mine who was also a sommelier mentioned this thing called verjus and told me that it was this wine grape juice that chefs used to make sauces at fancy restaurants and that also had traditional medicinal uses. It was very simple to make it.”
At left, Petite pearl grapes from the Gilbert’s Hill vineyard in Woodstock are used to produce verjus, together with St. Croix grapes and other winter-hardy varietals grown in Lincoln Bridge Farms’ own 600-vine vineyard. At center, Conner, left, sells her Lincoln Bridge Farms verjus at the Mt. Tom Farmers Market at Saskadena Six. At right, a bottle of Lincoln Bridge Farms Verjus. Courtesy of Sharen Conner
Conner next reached out to regulators at the Vermont Department of Agriculture to determine if she needed any type of license to produce verjus and sell it at the family’s farmstand. “The people at the state had absolutely no idea what I was talking about and told me I should talk to the cider people,” Conner said, referencing both the traditional cidermakers and the craft hard cider producers that have blossomed in Vermont over the past several decades. Buoyed by advice from cider producers, Conner began home-based verjus production in 2019, turning out two cases of 750 milliliter bottles of Lincoln Bridge Farms Verjus, all bottled and labeled by hand, totaling 18 liters of the heady, tart wine grape juice that first year.
Production from juice pressed from the Lincoln Bridge Farms vineyard doubled to four cases — or 36 liters — in 2020 and 2021, after Conner stepped down following four decades of teaching students with special needs. “I sold it at our farmstand, and in 2022, I decided to turn all of our juice into verjus. I started selling it at the Saskadena Six farmers’ market in addition to at the farmstand.” The following year, in 2023, Conner teamed up with Gilbert’s Hill homestead co-owner and viticulturalist Mary Margaret Sloan and started obtaining additional wine grapes for pressing from Sloan’s 700-vine vineyard off Barnard Road. Nowadays, Conner produces and bottles roughly 190 liters of Lincoln Bridge Verjus annually, primarily utilizing winter-hardy St. Croix and Petite Pearl wine grapes plucked early in the harvest season from both her own vineyard in West Woodstock and from the historic Gilbert’s Hill property owned and operated by Sloan and her husband, Howard Krum.
Conner’s market for her micro batches of verjus remains tiny, with little likelihood of it ever expanding beyond the immediate Upper Valley area, posing no threat whatsoever to those large California- and European-vintners who’ve contributed to burgeoning sales of the coveted traditional grape juice nationwide in recent years. Past and present outlets for Lincoln Bridge Farms Verjus have included chefs at the Woodstock Inn & Resort, Twin Farms in Barnard, and the Simon Pearce Restaurant in Quechee. Conner’s friends at the nearby Woodstock Farmer’s Market in West Woodstock have also stocked the local verjus on occasion. Distribution of small-batch verjus, however, can be challenging, Conner offered, because the finished, bottled product needs to be “cold-stabilized” — that is, refrigerated — to inhibit spontaneous wild fermentation. To that end, most of Conner’s verjus sales still occur at her family’s Lincoln Bridge farmstand, the Saskadena Six farmer’s market, or by word-of-mouth to culinary and non-alcoholic beverage aficionados who stop by the farm to pick up a bottle or two of the traditional grape elixir at a time.
Clearly passionate about verjus, Conner has penned a primer about the juice and its many uses that she shares with customers who’ve discovered the frothy, pleasantly piquant juice. “Today, it is still prevalent in French, Syrian, and Persian cooking, where it is the gentle acidic ingredient in vegetable and meat stews, fish marinades, and salad dressings,” Conner writes in the educational pamphlet. “In the modern kitchen, verjus is also a very versatile ingredient that can be used to poach, marinate, pickle, dress, cure and deglaze a roasting pan,” she adds.
The Woodstock vintner and verjus maker also points out that the significant spike in verjus production and sales in the United States in recent years has been driven in part by the juice’s use in “mocktails,” the non-alcoholic concoctions that have soared to popularity as alcohol consumption has dropped markedly in the country in recent years. And for those who are still inclined to imbibe, there’s the Maple Drop cocktail proffered by bartenders at the Woodstock Inn & Resort — a combination of Vermont-made vodka and maple syrup spiked with Lincoln Bridge Farms’ zesty juice.
To purchase Lincoln Bridge Farms verjus and learn more about its uses in a wide range of culinary, beverage, and traditional medicine applications, contact Sharen Conner at lincolnbridgefarms@gmail.com.
‘Notable Neighbor’ is a series of articles about ordinary people in our community who do some pretty extraordinary things.