Every September, as the days shorten and the Champlain Valley air turns crisp, Vermont's farms slide into their most satisfying season: harvest. Most of the state's celebrations involve apples and cider donuts. But on a 75-acre patch of Spear Street in Shelburne, the harvest ritual is taking a decidedly different shape. On September 20, 2026, from noon until four in the afternoon, the farm known as Fisher Brothers will host the first annual Grape-a-Palooza and Grilled Cheese Rave.
Sisters of Anarchy Ice Cream, the farm's farm-to-cone creamery, is throwing open its gates for an afternoon of pick-your-own grapes, grape stomping, a local DJ, grilled cheese sandwiches, and a full tasting of the farm's grape-derived creations: grape ice cream, grape sorbet, and wellness syrups. The event description invites visitors to "channel Lucille Ball by stomping grapes," a nod to the famous 1952 episode where Lucy stomps grapes in Italy. It's an image that captures the spirit of the event perfectly: silly, messy, and joyful.
The people behind this are Becky Castle and Bob Clark, a married couple who met at Middlebury College in the late 1980s. Their road to a Vermont berry farm was not a straight line. After college, Becky worked for The Carter Center in Atlanta, and Bob made his living in television and film production in Los Angeles. But they shared a dangerously deep love of ice cream. Bob grew up on a dairy farm in central New York, so the agrarian pull was in his blood. While living on the West Coast, the couple made a vow: to mitigate their ice cream obsession, they would only eat ice cream they had hand-cranked themselves. It was a promise that would eventually lead them back east, to a property on Spear Street, and to a business built around berries, bees, and small-batch frozen treats.
They purchased the 75 acres in 2013 and named the farm Fisher Brothers after the dairy farm run by Bob's grandfather and great uncles in New York. For two years, they enriched the soil with cover crops, studying what would grow best. They settled on berries, and in 2015 they planted their first bushes. By 2016, they were churning their first ice cream. Today, the farm grows blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, aronia berries, elderberries, and Marquette grapes spanning seven miles of row feet. The fruit is processed on-site and frozen the same day it is picked, and nearly every flavor element in their ice cream comes from the farm itself. Champlain Valley Apiaries keeps about 100 beehives on the farm, a symbiotic arrangement that keeps both pollinators and fruit thriving.
The name Sisters of Anarchy comes from the couple's three daughters, who, as Castle puts it, have created "a hurricane of anarchy" over the years. The daughters, now grown, have worked in every corner of the operation — weeding, planting, picking, even recording a theme song for the brand. The family philosophy, printed on the website, is simple: "Courage and roll the dice." That ethos is visible in flavors with names like Black Velvet If You Please, Bronx Cheer, and Crystal Blue Persuasion, and in a brand that treats whimsy as seriously as it treats terroir.
The grapes at the center of Grape-a-Palooza are Marquette grapes, a cold-hardy red variety developed at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s and now grown widely across the northern tier of the country. On this farm, they have become the basis for a range of products. The farm has introduced a grape sorbet called Un-whined, made with Marquette grapes. They have grape ice creams under the banner of Grape-ful. And now, they have wellness syrups — a nod to the growing interest in grape-based natural remedies, which draw on the fruit's reputation for antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds.
The Grilled Cheese Rave part of the equation is pure comfort-food synergy. What goes better with grape ice cream than a warm, buttery, melty grilled cheese? The event pairs the savory classic with the sweet grape offerings, creating a kind of tasting flight for the open-minded. A local DJ will provide music, and the pick-your-own grape operation means visitors can carry home a bit of the harvest, billed by the pound.
The event has an open-gate, low-key feel. There are no tickets mentioned, no VIP sections, no wristbands. You just show up to the farm at 4947 Spear Street, wander out to the grapevines, fill a bag, stomp a few grapes in a barrel, eat a grilled cheese, and try some grape sorbet. It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the polished, corporate harvest festivals that have proliferated across New England — and that appears to be precisely the point.
Sisters of Anarchy has built a following not by chasing trends but by being unapologetically itself. The farm is a working operation, not a theme park. Employees include full-time year-round staff, H-2A workers from Costa Rica, and seasonal hands. The production facility is the only producer of dry ice in Vermont, according to the company. Every scoop is made on-site, from fruit grown on-site, in a model the couple calls "vertically integrated agriculture." The result is a product that tastes like a place, and a brand that feels like a family.
The Grape-a-Palooza and Grilled Cheese Rave is a harvest festival in the truest sense: it celebrates what the farm actually grows and makes, in a way that invites the community to participate. You can pick the grapes. You can stomp them. You can eat them in ice cream, sorbet, and syrup form. You can sit in a farm field in Shelburne, listen to a DJ, and eat a grilled cheese sandwich while the late-September sun crosses the valley. It's messy, it's fun, and it's entirely in character for a family that named its business after the chaos of raising three daughters and built a farm from scratch on the strength of a shared love of ice cream, courage, and rolling the dice.
If Lucille Ball were alive today, she might have approved. She might even have traded her Italian vineyard for a grape barrel in Vermont — as long as someone made her a grilled cheese afterward.