You know the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?” Well, when life gives you unripe grapes, make verjus.
Sometimes I am not around in autumn to harvest the grapes in my yard. Sometimes I want a finer crop for wine, so I thin the fruit from my little vineyard of 11 plants.
Lest you think I could just gorge myself on grapes if I didn’t want to make wine, keep in mind that wine grapes are small, with lots of seeds — so they’re not the best for eating off the vine. What’s more, I hate the idea of wasting, so I make verjus.
Verjus, pronounced vehr-ZHOO, is a sort of vinegar made from the juice of unripe grapes. (It can also be spelled “verjuice”) The grapes you see in the picture are not green grapes, they are Zinfandel grapes, which will turn a lovely burgundy in a month or so. You can make verjus with any unripe grapes, even wild ones. You want to pick them the moment a few start to turn color.
As you may have surmised by the name, verjus is a French creation.
Traditionally it is made with the thinnings of a vineyard’s crop — the French thin their crop dramatically for reasons having to do with both the quality of the wine and because grapes can struggle to ripen in their comparatively cold climate. Many good California vineyards drop fruit in July to make the vines focus their energy on the remaining clusters. This makes better wine down the road.
Verjus itself is really nothing more than sour, acidic grape juice. But what it does is give a recipe acidity without the hammer of a true vinegar. A dish acidified with verjus will remain wine-friendly — if you’ve ever eaten vinegar pickles while drinking wine you will know that this is not a good combination…
So how do you make verjus? You will need unripe grapes. Lots of them. Anything you do with grapes requires many pounds for what seems like a small amount of juice. In winemaking, the ratio is typically 12 pounds of grapes to 1 gallon of wine. My verjus ratio was more like 12 pounds of grapes for about 2 to 3 quarts of verjus. So yeah, you need a bucket of grapes to make this.
Fortunately, green grapes grow near you. Most every place in America has wild grapes, usually along riversides. Go find some and fill a five-gallon bucket full. Or thin your personal vineyard…
How to Make Verjus
Ingredients
- 10 pounds unripe grapes
- 1 teaspoon citric acid
- 1/2 teaspoon sodium metabisulfite
Instructions
- Take most of the stems off the grapes. This will take some time, maybe an hour or so. Longer if you've never done it before. But if you don't do this part, you will have a tough time running the grapes through the food mill.
- Grind the grapes through a coarse die on your meat grinder. Sadly, the Kitchenaid attachment isn't strong enough for this task, so you need a real grinder. I use a 7 mm die -- large enough to let the seeds get through (you don't want to crush them) and small enough to grind even small grapes. If you have the meat grinder, this process takes only a couple minutes. If you don't, you can use a food mill fitted with a coarse plate. This is a distant second and will require a little elbow grease.
- As you get a slurry of ground-up grapes and grape juice, pour it into a bowl as you work. You will need to work quickly, as the grape juice will oxidize and turn brown. There is really no getting over this, but the faster you work the greener -- or at least more golden -- your verjus will be. Work slow and it will look like malt vinegar.
- Now you need to run the ground grapes through a fine mesh sieve. If you have rubber gloves, put them on. Why? The acid in these grapes made my hands sting for a couple hours after I squeezed the ground-up grapes over the sieve. And yes, you need to squeeze your grapes because you really want as much liquid as you can extract.
- You can take an optional step of straining the juice a second time through the strainer with a paper towel set inside. This will remove a lot of the extremely fine particulate matter floating in your verjus. As you pour, it will catch in the paper towel, eventually stopping the flow of the verjus. You will need to replace the paper towels a couple times.
- Finally, you will need to pour the strained juice into a Mason jar. It's at this point that you add the citric acid and sodium metabisulfite, if you are using them. Shake the jar well to mix everything in, then put it in the refrigerator for up to 2 days. There will be a very fine layer of sediment on the bottom, even if you did the paper towel trick. You will not be able to strain this off -- it is too fine.
- So, what you need to do is gently decant it into a clean container. You will lose some verjus, but that's OK. If you don't do this step your verjus will oxidize even more. Nothing bad will happen, but it will look ugly.
- Bottle and store in the fridge. It should last for several months in the refrigerator, and up to 9 months if you use the citric acid and sodium metabisulfite. You can also freeze it.
Notes
Pheasant with Verjus and Mushrooms
This is one of my favorite things to make with verjus. Great with chicken thighs, too.
I grow a few pinot noir vines and am interested in learning how to make vers juice. I know to pick the green grapes before version occurs but when is the best time to harvest?
Is there a winery in South East England that makes it?
David: You pick when the first grapes start verasion. You want them green, but full of juice. As for England, I have no idea. I live in California.
It is also good to make with crabapples.
Greetings,
How can you make the Verjus shelf stable?
Cheers,
Rachel
Rachel: You can’t. It needs to stay cool.
Hank- if you have a cider/wine press, could you just use that?
Paula: Absolutely.
In winemaking, sodium metabisulphite is used to sterilise the bottles, potassium metabisulphite is used to sterilise the wine.
What’s the best way to get other flavours in the verjuice? Say I wanted to do an elderflower verjuice. Would you recommend heating the juice slightly and steeping the elderflower or simply place the flower in the jar and infuse it slowly in the fridge?
Can I use a juice extractor?
Frances: No idea. Give it a try!
thank you for this post, really helped me to get what’s make verjuice the end color, I really love that reddish brown color of oxidation which take happens on verjuice, it’s even more delicious then.
Here there are tradition methods to make verjuice, which they biol the juice for little time, and add salt to it, perhaps for long time storing.
I failed to catch those taste and color in last year try, trying again this year, and i think let it rest in air get well oxidation.
Hallo from the south west of England! I have a young outdoor vine, and got 12 lbs of grapes this year. Weather wasn’t good this summer so I picked them green & this week made Hank’s verjus recipe. All went well in the early stages, it had a lovely fresh tart taste. But after I added the citric acid and sodium metabisulphate, the colour lightened, it’s gone cloudy, and doesn’t taste so good. I swear I can taste the sodium m. Wilk this go away? Will it settle and clarify again? It’s now in the fridge. I’ll be so sad if the original flavour has been lost. Help!
Alexandra: It will settle, down, but remember that fresh verjus will sour in days. It’s a tradeoff.
What would happen if I just pulsed in my blender? It would get the seeds I’m sure but what will this do to it? Never have made before but we just moved to a house with a TON of grapes and am interested in things i can do with them.
Asena: Chances are you’d cut seeds, which would make the verjus very tannic.
Is there a certain sugar count (Brix) of grapes?
Kyna: Not for this. You want to crush them when you see the first grapes start to turn color, and you want to use the green ones then.
I have two big containers of green Concord grapes that I’m going to attempt to make this. I don’t have a food mill or a steam juicer so I’m going to attempt to lightly pulse them in my Vitamix. Hoping that won’t break the seeds. I made about 50 quarts of fresh, whole (yes, seeds, skins and all!) grape juice in it that I put in Ball jars and froze. At the low setting, the seeds didn’t seem to break.
DD: Will not work. Verjus is made with unripe grapes. All you will make at this time of the year is grape juice. Sorry!
I made verjus for the first time in 2014 using a handblender to break up the grapes. I found that straining though muslin cloth allowed me to squeeze the blended grapes really well and I got much more juice compared to using a seive. My verjus began fermenting after a couple of weeks which improved the flavour (I guess because the wild yeast from the grapes would have used up the tiny amount of sugar in the juice.) After this a larger sediment formed so I decanted and found the resulting liquid to be completely clear and almost colourless, but tasting amazing. Does anyone else find that their verjus ferments?
I’m curious about what would happen if the grape seeds do get crushed- will it alter the taste? I would like to try it with my masticating juicer but I’m pretty sure it will crush the seeds.
Funny you should post this. I recently got a beautiful shipment of unripe grapes (we call them ghooreh) from persianbasket.com. Persians/Armenians use them to add tartness to our sauces. Never thought to juice them. Even better!
I also make verjus using a steam juicer – it yields a very fine clear concentrate. I add a pinch of citric or malic acid to taste, then process it in the canner. The heat turns the liquid rosey red, but the taste is unaltered and it keeps for years in the pantry. Refrigerate once opened.
Hello, I use a steam extractor for making verjus and it works well. I leave the grapes on the stem. I ran across this excellent site while looking for recipes. I’m making verjus today, and was wondering how others are doing it.
Do you think a steam juicer would work? I can apple juice this way and it stores for years with no additives. Thanks,
Chad
Chad: I honestly don’t know. Can you try it and report back? I don’t have a steam juicer…