Fusion Verjus Rouge

710 ml - California

Verjus Rouge red verjuice

Verjus (pronounced vair-ZHOO) is the tart, fresh juice of unripe wine grapes. It is a culinary ingredient indigenous to the world's wine producing regions that is used in sauce making, for poaching fish and meat, and to dress lettuces, vegetables and fruit.

Verjus or "verjuice" as it is sometimes called, literally means green juice in the sense that it's made from fruit that has yet to fully ripen - it's green. It is used to add acidity to foods, an important component in food and in cooking.

Napa Valley Verjus Rouge is made from wine grapes that are removed from the vine in midsummer, at a point in the growing cycle called veraison.

At veraison, they change in color from green to black, and begin to soften enough to press.

As the grapes arrive at the winery, they are loaded into large pneumatic presses where the juice is gently extracted, then transferred to refrigerated stainless steel tanks. The non-alcoholic red grape juice is allowed to settle for a couple of days, then it is lightly filtered and packaged.

The fresh verjus is at its best right after pressing, and can be packaged immediately. The challenging part of the production is keeping the verjus from fermenting and becoming wine; crushed grapes will spontaneously ferment due to airborne yeasts.

Commercially, non-alcoholic red grape juice is usually stabilized by either adding powerful preservatives like benzoic acid, or by traditional canning methods - the juice must be heated to a temperature high enough to kill yeast cells and bacteria.

Both of these methods adversely affect the taste of the finished product.

At Fusion Foods, their goal is to produce the most natural, fresh-tasting juice by protecting its delicate aromas and flavors. To achieve this they use a technology called aseptic packaging. With this process, no strong preservatives are necessary and the fresh verjus is exposed to high temperature for only 4 seconds.

This product contains Sulfur Dioxide.