The Farm
In 2021, the Rose-Chertok family left behind the unglamorous garage winery and moved to a gorgeous 19th century orchard in the small town of Shoreham in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. Something like 1,000 people live in this wee little hamlet and it is every bit the cute rural community you’re picturing. We’ve got the white-steepled church, the historic inn, a bunch of farms, and basically nothing else. The farm is a dream... We have 15 acres of neglected apple trees to rehabilitate, a farm ecosystem to rebuild and we’ve just got the first 6 of 12 acres of vines in the ground but we are steadily growing this into a self-reliant, polyculture farm business with big plans.
While we could be described as an organic farm, we are not certified and have no intentions to be. We believe in the importance of a competition oriented, ecological system and believe in betterment through diversity but we are still learning what that means for our farm. For now, we are focusing on building rather than negating, working towards a self regenerating system through extensive (rather than intensive) practices. We ferment liquid green manures from foraged comfrey and nettle as well as other wild plants and we convert our prunings into biochar to capture carbon and create a powerful medium for dispersing effective microbes. Understory weed management is performed with a much-loved hand scythe and we have a mobile chicken coop ferry around our bug noshing and fertilizing Brahma chickens. One day we hope to be raising geese for meat, tending sheep for fiber and growing flowers for natural dyes and bouquets but for now, we are a wine farm in the process of becoming something more.
