Wines of Vermont: A History of Pioneer Fermentation

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INTRODUCTION

Wine is now being grown in more places in the world than at any point in recorded time. Advancement in agricultural practice and a boom in winery operations technology have supported growth in wine’s quality, quantity and range. In the last four decades, the number of wineries in the United States has grown from a few hundred to several thousand, and American winemaking has spread from a few places to every state in the country. Given these trends, it should come as no surprise that there are wineries in Vermont. Yet it is still a concept that raises eyebrows. In this forty-year period of growth in the wine industry, Vermont winemaking has experienced its own birth and mini-boom on a scale appropriate to the small state. More remarkable is that the quality and array of Vermont wines has grown along with the number of producers. Farmhouse-fermented products were a quiet tradition in the Green Mountains long before the commercial age, and wine artisans of today work to honor that past. In doing so, these winemakers are gaining the attention and appreciation of consumers, as well as acclaim in the mainstream press.

Wine may be perceived as many things, from a simple daily beverage to an investment, a piece of transitory art or—at its epitome—a vehicle that conveys the very taste of the place where it has been made. Wine comes into being via a great many combined forces: the living ground from which it grows, the variable weather that may alternately caress and thrash it, the various fruits through which its potential arises and the nurturing of the hands that grow and harvest it. Wine can also act as a meter of time through the stories it tells using the land’s markers of past eons, the cultural changes over centuries, the passing seasons, each day’s checklist of chores and, eventually, as a vintage year label on a bottle. Just as the roots of vines can grow more deeply and widely than one might expect, so, too, the backstory of Vermont wine has depth and breadth that are not necessarily apparent on the surface. What is required to make a glass of wine in these northern latitudes takes on new meaning when we consider the legacy of the unique ancient natural features of Vermont, the histories of traditional and new raw materials that are cultivated and the stories of human influences at the cultural and personal levels—all of which have synergized to make this innovation possible. Commercial winemaking began in Vermont forty-five years ago with a simple plan to keep agricultural land in production, generate economy and make a uniquely good drink following a traditional recipe. The history of wine in Vermont is not a linear path; rather, it is a web of stories that tells of individual characters, the ever-evolving culture and the landscape that shapes them both. These are themes that regularly surface in the story of the tiny wine revolution that has been slowly fermenting in the Green Mountain State.

Wines of Vermont blend craft and history.

In the wider context of fermented beverages, the wines of Vermont are ripening between the rise of an undisputed reputation for quality and leadership in the modern craft beer industry and a more recent explosion of interest in the production and consumption of hard cider. Whereas the history of beer and cider in New England goes back to the earliest colonial times, the idea of successful winemaking in these northern reaches is without real precedent, despite being a hard-sought goal since European explorers first arrived in the region. We may assume there was a colonial cottage industry and barter system among the small batch fermentations of all sorts created by Vermont’s colonial inhabitants, but only in the modern age, nearly four centuries since the idea was planted, has the dream of a commercial cold climate wine become reality.

There are a number of points in time when circumstance laid the groundwork for the wines of Vermont as we taste them today, and these should be recognized as important aspects of a long gestation. However, the 1970s mark a critical juncture when a confluence occurred and something novel began to crystallize. In bursts over the course of each subsequent decade, a modern wine industry has come into being. The first commercial wineries of the late twentieth century predate the modern records kept by the Vermont Department of Liquor Control that currently reach back only as far as 1992. The original state-sanctioned operation in Vermont can be traced to a Danby 1800s-era barn, where, in 1970, Frank Jedlicka broke ground with a plan to resurrect tradition by producing new renditions of country wine. For several years, Jedlicka produced wine from apples, fruits, maple and honey, favoring these ferments over the grape, which just did not seem to be a viable option. These alternative ferments remain a part of Vermont winemaking today.

Just as Jedlicka was starting his fermentation business in southern Vermont, Ken Albert was making a home in Shelburne, to the north. With optimism akin to that of settlers three hundred years earlier, one of the first things Albert did was carve a garden plot out of the forest. However, this plot was not destined to grow subsistence vegetables; rather, it was meant to trial French hybrid grapes in the hope that the effort would produce at least a bit of wine. In time, these vines did yield small harvests that were captured in single digit–sized bottlings, and as Ken wrote wryly, they seemed drinkable at the time. This small, struggling amateur vineyard in the woods would prove to be the first step of many Albert took toward becoming a standard-bearer for Vermont wine.

Just a few years later, in 1978, Ray Knutsen was walking his family farm in Benson, near the southeastern shore of Lake Champlain, with his college roommate. This friend had introduced Ray to wine not long before, blowing his mind with a German late-harvest Riesling. Exclaiming at the massive size of a grapevine growing at the edge of the woods, and noting that the slate soils beneath their feet were similar to those of Germany’s Mosel Valley, Ray’s friend insisted he plant a vineyard. A single moment of exuberance touched off in Ray a long, slow burn in pursuit of a quest that most anyone at the time would have thought impossible. An area of the farm was prepared, and a series of traditional European Vitis vinifera plantings began, with the idea to make a great American wine—despite the fact that, to most, putting vineyard trellises on Vermont ground was tantamount to tilting at windmills.

While new ground was being probed by fresh vines fueled by a dream of wine, the 1970s also saw the genesis in Vermont of a locally grown food movement alongside elevated consumer consciousness about wine and its place at the table. Back-to-the-land farms were growing and harvesting more than mere subsistence required, and the excess produce began to find its way into home kitchens and restaurant tables around the state—a practice that today’s Vermonters may take for granted. Nationally, fine wine was beginning to flow toward the mainstream, and a small import company called Vineyard Brands, started in a Chester, Vermont barn in 1971, would play a large part in that process.

In central Vermont, Linda and Ted Fondulas created an eating establishment where these movements merged, long before they themselves became personally involved in the fermentation arts. Led in part by foresight and also driven by the pragmatic need to create a meal experience for which guests would return, they were budding Woodstock restaurateurs in 1975 when they first sourced beefalo raised in the neighboring hills of North Pomfret. A subsequent trip to France included a life-changing experience at a small rural restaurant over a meal made from ingredients grown in the kitchen yard. Ted and Linda thought that if such a thing could be done in the middle-of-nowhere French countryside, perhaps the same could be accomplished in middle-of-nowhere Vermont. Hemingway’s in Killington was opened soon after, and a well-laid table beckons wine. A 1984 New England Culinary Institute graduation speech by Julia Child held in the state capital of Montpelier inspired Hemingway’s to develop a wine program that would be appreciated by visitors from more cosmopolitan places and, more importantly, would provide leadership in the education of the Vermont wine consumer.

Two producers came online in the 1980s focusing on apple wines made from local harvests, and both went on to become successful businesses. One winery operated for over twenty years in Jacksonville. The other, by developing a hard cider called Woodchuck, introduced a new product to the marketplace that would go on to transform the adult beverage game as we know it today in Vermont and across the country. These innovators of apple fermentation were decades ahead of their time in market terms despite the fact that they were dipping into centuries-old processes for their inspiration.

The 1990s saw a further increase in wine production using orchard and berry fruits, as well as the introduction of honey fermentation. Putney Mountain and Grand View wineries are award-winning examples of the former, while the true farmhouse ciders of Flag Hill and the mead of L’Abeille foreshadowed things to come. Yet the goal of producing north country grape wines lived on, and a pair of projects made the first real commitments and attempts to grow and bottle something that had remained a dream for centuries.

The business plan that Harrison Lebowitz hatched in 1992, and which would develop into Snow Farm Vineyard four years later, was an innovation of Vermont agriculture. The plight of some neighbors taught Lebowitz that much of Vermont’s open land was in jeopardy, facing pressure from commercial and residential development and an unfavorable business climate forcing consolidation on many small dairy farms. The agricultural landscape of Vermont had experienced radical change since the time when European adventurers first started drawing lines on maps for pioneer colonists, and it seemed to be time for yet another shift. Wine growing might offer an opportunity to change the equation. Nineteenth-century western migration and more recent globalization had put serious competitive pressure on Vermont agriculture for over one hundred years. The answer, as Lebowitz saw it, was radical localization of the Vermont farm and foodscape, creating a new agricultural identity with wine grapes on very old ground. He hedged the bets that Albert and Knutsen had placed years earlier, planting both Vitis vinifera and French hybrids on a Lake Champlain island, some of which remain in production today.

Whereas Harrison began with an abstract concept, Dave Boyden was just trying to build a business that would keep his own family farm viable. In somewhat out-of-the-way Cambridge, north and east of Burlington, Boyden Farm benefits from a beaten track that brings traffic past its door during the winter season when travelers from all points make their way to the ski slopes of Smuggler’s Notch. Making wine seemed to Boyden a reasonable way to allow the land to produce a crop that could become a valuable product. Vines were planted, other local fruit sources were identified and a producer’s license was secured in 1996. While changes and updates to the program and portfolio have been ongoing, Boyden remains one of the largest and most diversified producers in Vermont today.

The turn of the century brought with it a bright new promise for wine in cold climates, as grapes selected for extreme weather made their way from university and private breeding programs into the ground. Decades of fastidious hand rearing gave rise to a new class of plants with resistance to disease pressures, the ability to survive cold winters and, most importantly, ability to bear a healthy crop that could make good wine. This tipped the scales for many who had previously thought the northern climate winemaking endeavor too precarious and further emboldened those who had already been working at the goal for years. An early field trial of University of Minnesota varieties was planted in 2000 at Ray Knutsen’s Benson vineyard. Just a couple of years later, Chris and Michaela Granstrom started a nursery in New Haven that eventually became Lincoln Peak Winery, while Andy Farmer planted Northeast Vine Supply, which has become one of the most respected providers of cold climate plant material in the northern United States. These commitments precipitated the most recent wave of change, with re-plantings and new plantings by existing operations, an increasing number of new growers interested in testing the land and growth in the volume of Vermont wine being produced.

Looking beyond the commercial timeline, the history of Vermont wine gets even more interesting when we consider other lenses through which it can be viewed. The producers of the wines of Vermont may be relative newcomers, but their personal histories often reflect longer arcs that brought them from other places and vocations into the winery. They now sit within a rich cultural context planted in the Old World, with a strong sense of independence and self-reliance drawn from pioneer origins and imbued with lessons learned from modern social changes that have spread through the Green Mountains. The various fermentable fruits of the earth have their own histories, from stories of native vegetation to immigrant plants that have come to grow in this place and become part of the agricultural tradition. The new generation of cold climate wine grapes that transformed Vermont’s potential in the last ten years is a product of slow, deliberate breeding going back a century and a half to a time when the wine world was on the brink of extinction. The soils in which the wines grow tell a living tale far longer than human history. The unique