
This Low-Alcohol Sparkling Wine Heralds a New Kind of Party Drink
A stunning low-alcohol sparkling wine from an artist and a natural-wine maven heralds a new kind of party drink

Julia Sherman (right) and Martha Stoumen. Photo by Salad for President, LLC/courtesy of Jus Jus
When author and artist Julia Sherman opened a bottle of verjus while cooking at Scribe Winery’s Hacienda during her 2017 book tour, she didn’t expect it to launch a new project, let alone create a whole new category of wine. Verjus, the tart juice pressed from unripe grapes, is usually used for cooking or mixing into cocktails, not for drinking straight from the bottle. This bottle, however, had accidentally undergone fermentation and bubbled over when opened. A curious sip revealed the result: effervescent and mouth-puckeringly tart, and just slightly alcoholic, like drinking a green apple Jolly Rancher. It had the properties of wine and the taste of wine, but it wasn’t really wine, at least not as it’s usually experienced.
“It was kind of like a light bulb went off in my head,” says Sherman. “And I thought this could be a really cool thing to try and make, since all of the ingredients are already there for fermentation: sugar in the grapes and naturally occurring yeast.” And with that the idea for Jus Jus, a low-ABV sparkling wine, was born.

Salad for President, LLC/Courtesy of Jus Jus
With one foot in the art world and one foot in the food world with her platform Salad for President—a project showcasing artists in the kitchen that ultimately became a cookbook—Sherman says that drinking was becoming more of a habit than something she was truly enjoying, moving through openings, dinners, and parties with an obligatory drink in hand. “It seems like for a lot of people, especially in our industry, drinking is becoming an everyday thing,” says Sherman. “And I didn’t love that.” And in her own life, drinking less had become part of her journey toward motherhood, curtailing drinking while trying to become pregnant and ultimately enjoying the way not drinking made her feel.