“Let food be thy medicine,” goes the adage attributed to Hippocrates, but who wants it if it doesn’t taste good? Enter Finger Lakes Harvest, where beverages are created to not only be delicious but to nourish, delight, and help people stay healthier.

Beyond an anonymous turquoise door above a warehouse loading dock in Dundee is a cavernous workshop where sixty-plus products offered by Finger Lakes Harvest (fingerlakesharvest.com) are slowly and carefully crafted. The scent inside holds the promise of spice, fruit, and general deliciousness. The husband and wife team of Andri Goncurovs and Dorothy Milford Poppleton has spent more than eleven years exploring flavors and crafting recipes in order to bring a revered ancient product—shrub—into the twenty-first century.

Both lifelong foodies who discovered a shared history as commercial bakers when they met, they often talked about once-popular foods long fallen into obscurity. One of these was shrub, a naturally non-alcoholic beverage made by preserving fruit with vinegar, sugar, herbs, and spices. Andri says the process originated in India, then made its way westward to the Middle East, where it was called Shahab, then spread to Italy, where its name might have been shortened to “shrub,” and, from there, throughout Europe. Ben Franklin included instructions in Poor Richard’s Almanac on how to craft shrubs. Shrub recipes appear in Martha Washington’s family’s cookbooks. Sailors drank it at sea to prevent scurvy. It has a historical connection to western upstate New York, which was a hotbed of the nineteenth century temperance movement.

One Finger Lakes Harvest shrub is called Spice X. It features lemon and spices, and is based on none other than Samuel Clemens’ (Mark Twain’s) recipe for gingerbread that Dorothy’s research turned up from an 1870s issue of Harpers.

It was in 2014 while on vacation that Dorothy spotted a lone bottle of shrub at a farmstand in Ipswich, Massachusetts. She and Andri tried it, liked the taste, and began experimenting with ways to craft it in their home kitchen, beginning with a bushel of peaches. One fruit led to another, more kitchen crafting ensued, and they had a product. Several of them.

Shrub is a multi-purpose drink. It may be enjoyed straight from the bottle as a beverage or marinade. It may be used as an ingredient in salad dressing, or combined with water, juice, or alcohol to create a flavored water, cocktail, or mocktail.

“And we thought, ‘what a great way to showcase all the wonderful fruits we grow in the Finger Lakes,’” Dorothy says.

“We wanted to make something that wasn’t known so much,” Andri explains. They also liked shrub’s health benefits, including its ability to hydrate and serve as a vehicle for nourishing ingredients. One of the first fruits they harvested for shrub-making purposes were wild grapes, he continues, surmising they were “possibly descendants of the ones grown in the 1800s.”

“We’re always looking for unique and interesting foods,” Andri says.

They began selling shrubs at local farmers’ markets, then wholesale across the country, necessitating moves to progressively larger production facilities. When they relocated to the Cornell Agriculture and Food Technology Park in Geneva, it was big enough that Dorothy thought they’d found their forever place. But as the popularity of their products continued to grow, so did their need for additional space. They found it in Dundee, in a building formerly used by the Seneca Grape Juice Company, now known as Seneca Foods, which had relocated to Fairport, New York.

The only drawback was a long commute. Problem solved in late 2024 when they bought a nearby farmhouse with enough land to plant an acre and a half of elderberries and some of the herbs they regularly use. The area around their production space also has land to grow more of their ingredients.

Serendipitously, when Seneca Foods relocated they left behind equipment Andri was able to refurbish. One of his favorite surprises, when he first toured the place, was an enameled sign labeled “Vinegar Production” leading to the portion of the he they had already earmarked for exactly that purpose.

Shrubs and other Finger Lakes Harvest products begin with apple cider, slowly cold-fermented from locally-pressed juice. The cold fermentation takes longer, but it allows the cider to develop into the vinegar they want rather than an alcoholic product. Naturally, people in wine country associate fermentation with the production of alcohol, Andri says, but the low pH of the vinegar means neither bacteria nor yeast can propagate. “That’s why vinegar is a great natural food,” he says.

In nearby containers are fragrant “mother” cultures—different collections of yeast and acetic acid bacteria used to inoculate and “back-ferment” the cider. This is also called the Orleans method, an old French method for fermenting apple cider into vinegar, yielding a product rich in probiotics. “It takes six to eight months,” Andri says, several years more if the final product is intended to become balsamic vinegar.

Fruits are washed, then frozen. This not only allows them to make shrubs year-round, but also bursts the cell sacs and brings the fruit sugars to a more ambient form, he continues. “In the olden days they had to process it right away. But this way, you get a deeper, richer flavor.” The method gets tweaked for each distinct set of ingredients, as each fruit needs slightly different handling.

The thirty varieties of shrub listed on their website include the expected fruits grown in the northeast as well as a chocolate and hot pepper combination they call Coco Loco, and varietals like garlic, ginger, and hot pepper.

The process is slow and cold—only a few degrees above freezing—with most shrubs taking six to eight months, start to finish. Bitters, herbal extracts made from bitter tasting plants and traditionally used as a digestive aid or as a cocktail ingredient, take two to three years; fire ciders, typically a spicy tonic crafted from vinegar, herbs, and spices, and used to support the immune system and as a digestive aid, take eighteen months. Eventually the ingredients are combined, the mixtures are flash-pasteurized, and then bottled. This last can be its own headache, judging from the array of samples in Andri’s office/lab.

“I’ve learned a lot about bottles and caps,” he notes.

Some customers embraced the shrubs but wanted a sugar-free product, which gave rise to their bitters and tonics. Turmeric (anti-inflammatory, a natural antibiotic), ginger (natural pain reliever, digestive aid), and tart cherry (anti-inflammatory, reduces gout attacks) are among the most popular tonics.

The full line of Finger Lakes Harvest products can be found at Oak Hill Bulk Foods, Route 14A, Penn Yan, ordered online, and, with sales across the country, are probably available somewhere near you. Try Gerould’s Pharmacy, with branches in Elmira, Corning, and Horseheads for elderberry syrup, tonics, and fire cider.