Food + Drink

food+drink Out of This World

Kalche Wine Cooperative brings a new model to Vermont’s natural wine scene

BY JORDAN BARRY • jbarry@sevendaysvt.com

Kalche wines at the Burlington Farmers Market

Kalchē Wine Cooperative knows how to throw a party. The Fletcher-based natural winery’s chilled reds, ciders, coferments and piquettes — appropriately called “space juice” — are vibrant, experimental, immensely drinkable and downright fun.

The cooperative’s female and nonbinary owners, a majority of whom are Black, celebrated their first release with a bash at Switchback Brewing in December 2021. Founders Kathline Chery, Justine Belle Lambright and Grace Meyer have since hosted wine nights at T. Rugg’s Tavern, a spring Festival of Dionysus at Hotel Vermont and, in late June, a packed fundraiser for Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom at the Wallflower Collective.

Even Kalchē’s tent at the weekly Burlington and Jericho farmers markets is a blast: It’s full of disco balls.

“A party environment is very much where these wines belong,” Lambright said. “They are festive, and I think everyone who buys our wines should throw a party to drink them.”

As fun as they are, the wines can also be moody, as the winery’s name suggests. Kalchē is an ancient Greek word meaning “to catch the purplefish,” Chery said — a metaphor for searching and longing for something highly prized. “Sometimes it’s celebratory. Sometimes it’s really pensive,” Chery said. “We contain multitudes.”

The cooperatively owned winery has serious goals: to broaden the definition of wine while, in the words of the owners, centering diversity, sustainability and the decolonization of wine.

As they head into their second harvest, Kalchē’s founders are right on trend with the experimental energy of Vermont’s growing natural wine scene. Chery, the team’s winemaker and director of

JAMES BUCK

production, plays with hybrid grapes, apples, cranberries, foraged botanicals, hops, maple sap and even products that would otherwise be wasted, such as leftover brine from pickled beets.

“We have a lot of soapboxes,” Lambright said. “We hold on really tightly to our morals and values and what we won’t do with the wine. But what the wine actually does is just Kathline, the fruit and nature.”

According to Vivid Coffee owner Ian Bailey, who poured the winery’s space juice at a Vermont wine pop-up in June, “Kalchē doesn’t miss.”

The winery occupies what was originally an extension of the cellar at Bob Lesnikoski’s Vermont Cranberry farm in Fletcher. The team has worked with “Cranberry Bob” to plant a vineyard on-site. He’s also their de facto machinist and mad scientist, with a telepathic sense of when something’s about to break, Meyer said.

Young itasca, frontenac blanc, frontenac gris, frontenac noir and crimson pearl vines grow on the hill across from the winery, just above a cranberry bog that’s been on the property for 25 years. Kalchē’s owners pay rent when Lesnikoski lets them, Lambright said, and help press cranberry juice at the end of the season. The grapes they’ve planted will start bearing fruit in three years and reach their best quality in five. For now, they make wine from what they have access to — and can afford — in Vermont’s limited grape market. At Huntington River Vineyard, where they have a cropshare arrangement, they kicked off the harvest season with osceola muscat grapes earlier this month. They work with other winemakers and community members, too, purchasing, foraging or bartering for ingredients that include fruits and botanicals not commonly found in the strict confines of the traditional wine world.

“There’s an abundance of flavor right around us,” Chery said. “Being a nimble and scrappy business — that’s definitely a plus.”

Despite the wine industry’s dominant narratives of “noble grapes” and “old world” appellations, that flexibility is nothing new.

“That perceived ‘normal’ took the place of what was already here,” Chery said. “When we’re talking about decolonizing wine, this is it.”

Kalchē’s experimentation has occasionally been confusing to the powers that be, especially when it comes to how they describe what’s in the bottle. Meyer, the winery’s director of internal business, has spent a lot of time on the phone with the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which regulates labeling.

“With this changing landscape, they’ve been incredibly kind and helpful,” Meyer said. “But they’re all telling me different things.”

Viburnum, an early release in collaboration with subscription-based Viticole Wine, was particularly confounding. It was a piquette — created by an old-school method of rehydrating and repressing grape skins that many natural winemakers have returned to over the past few years. Into it went winery scraps, foraged highbush cranberries and a touch of maple syrup for bottle conditioning.

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