I must confess, though, that I haven't tried verjuice as a drink with ice. Certainly it is "fruity" and "fresh-tasting," but so is any good fruit vinegar, like my favorite ones from the Huilerie Beaujolaise. The old German Fuchs winery explains its production and recommended uses. It looks to me like yet one more addition to the zillion gourmet vinegar-like products.
The wine-like, clear, light-and-fruity verjuice produced now by wineries all over the world does not impress me much. I often use it instead of lemon in vinaigrettes and in skordalia, the traditional garlic sauce, as a cook from the Pelion Mountain, in central Greece, suggested to me years ago. This freshly pressed juice is wonderfully tart, and not too sour. The easiest way for us is to crush the grapes in a blender, pass the pulp through a sieve, and either use it immediately or freeze it. So we decided to cut our grapes green and use them to make condiments, like the medieval verjuice or the old Persian ab-ghooreh and its Middle Eastern variations. Come harvest time we just find bunches of rotten half-eaten grapes.
Sour grape plus#
Plus we hardly ever manage to harvest them when they ripen, since wasps and all kinds of insects attack them as soon as they start to blush.
But the dark grapes our vines produce late in August, although sweet, are filled with seeds and difficult to swallow. To try Aglaia's recipe for Persian verjuice (the tart juice of unripe grapes), click here, or click here for her recipe for garlic spread with sour grapes.įrom the very old and robust grape vines that engulf the fence of our property in Kea we gather and stuff tender grape leaves in May for our trademark dolmades.