PUTNEY-It was certainly not their first career when Kate and Charles Dodge founded the Putney Mountain Winery in 1998.
But now, having successfully built a sophisticated wine business, they are moving on to their life's next chapter. On Aug. 1, they finalized the sale of the company to five of their employees - who call their company "The Fermented Five" - and who will carry the business into the future as an employee cooperative.
Before the winery, Charles, 83, had been a professor of music at Dartmouth. Before that, as a trained composer, he was on the cutting edge of computer music - so much so that Stevie Wonder once called him at midnight to discuss his process.
And Kate, 74, was part of a successful law practice in Brattleboro.
But when Charles moved to teaching part-time, he went looking for something else to do.
"I had this time to fill, and also half an income to worry about, so I thought the winery would be really fun and, God help me, if I had to work for a living, right?" he said dryly.
He and Kate were sitting opposite each other at a long table in the back of the winery in the old Basketville building in Putney. With them were the Fermented Five: Kim Wallace, 49; Jason Hubner, 42; his wife, Amber Hubner, 39, Lauren Osowski, 44, and Richard Fairchild, 65.
Jason, a talented winemaker, learned the craft from Charles and worked with him developing products for 13 years. Then he left to develop his farm.
The prospect of a sale drew him back.
"After doing the farm for a couple years, I realized I really missed the wine making," Jason said. "I know that the Dodges were trying to sell the business, and finally it dawned on me that this opportunity, which was still present, was soon going to disappear.
"So if I didn't take it, it would probably be gone forever," he continued. "If they either sold it to someone else, or just closed the doors and liquidated everything, that moment was approaching. And so I finally jumped in on that, and here I am."
Starting the winery
"I started the winery at home," Charles remembered, thinking back. "I had some students at Dartmouth - graduate students of age - who were making beer. And I thought it'd be fun to make beer, but then I drove past the Green Mountain Orchard every night going home and realized that while beer has ingredients from all over the world, here's the Green Mountain Orchard with local fruit."
And so, he thought, "that's the way to go."
The Dodges had always traveled and enjoyed the local wines wherever they went, "because local is fresh and it tastes better," Charles said. They became locavores before the word was even coined.
As it turned out, making the wine was fun; selling it and running a business was another thing altogether.
"I was a lawyer, and Charles was a college professor," Kate said. "Neither one of us had a clue how to run a business. We thought it would be a lot easier than it was, and we learned as we went along. I was a little hesitant, I should say, but I grew into it."
In 2005, Kate quit her day job.
"So for me, it's been a lot of fun," she said. "With some headaches, of course."
A story in The Boston Globe gave them their first break.
"The first year, we were very lucky," Charles said. "There was a feature in the fall Apple issue of the Globe, and it featured us with our new apple wine. People flocked to to buy it the next year, while we were still making it in our basement."
He remembered a local gas station owner congratulating him on his booming business; so many people, he said, were stopping at his garage to ask for directions to the Dodge house, looking to buy apple wine.
Those directions must have been complicated, because "You know how many people made it to our home?" Kate said. "None. Not one person made it."
So they talked to Greg Wilson, the owner of Basketville, the large wicker import company, about renting space in its landmark building on Route 5 in Putney.
"They let us rent a space in the corner with a card table to sell our wine to their customers," Charles said. "And Basketville was, of course, teeming in those days. So we made a go of it by selling wine here.
But over the years, Basketville's retail business suffered some blows, while its wholesale business "grew and grew," Charles said. "At some point, Greg said their retail was starting to decline and ours was increasing. More people were coming to us and then buying a basket as well."
Wilson told Charles that a fraction of his basket business was retail and the vast majority was wholesale, but most of the headaches came from the retail operation. He wasn't joking.
"So they closed it down in 2008, and at that point Greg renovated the space, and rented a third of it, about 5,000 square feet to us, and that's where we are today," Charles said.
The products
Today, the company produces a variety of sophisticated fruit wines. Simply Blueberry, a dry and smooth red dinner wine, is one of them. Others are made, respectively, from rhubarb, pears, northern spy apples, and cranberries.
Cranberry? Rhubarb?
"When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, rhubarb wine was a thing because there wasn't much else to make wine from," Charles said. "So probably at much too early an age, I learned rhubarb wine. We started making rhubarb wine from from local rhubarb. And then we found blueberries and strawberries and raspberries. And we gradually expanded to pears.
"We did a lot of apples, all from Green Mountain Orchard, from Paul Dutton over in Newfane, and from the Scott Farm in Dummerston."
In 2013, the company began experimenting with liqueurs, and it received its license to sell them in 2015. One is made from maple syrup and apple brandy, one from ginger, one from honey, and another from chocolate. Their Vermont Cassis is marketed as "spectacular, luscious, and decadent." The company also produces a non-alcoholic sparkling cider.
"People came to us with a very large bias towards grape wines," Kate said. "Probably the younger people coming through were more interested in adventure and learning something new and trying something new. And they would leave with these big smiles on their faces."
The winery's products are now distributed in Vermont and New Hampshire. The company has revenues of between $500,000 and $600,000 a year, Kate said.
Eventually, despite their success, the Dodges wanted to move on to other adventures. Both their children are grown and living in Chicago now, and there are grandchildren to spend time with.
Selling the business
When the Dodges first thought of selling the business, the employees weren't ready to buy it. So they listed the company.
But they were less than enchanted with the prospective buyers they attracted. None, for example, would have kept the business in Putney.
"It's a complicated business, and quite a few of the people who looked into it came from out of town," Kate said. "One couple lives in Stowe. And they said, 'Do you think we could run it from Stowe?' And we were like, 'Really? No.' Another one was in Georgia or somewhere. So none of them seemed a really good fit."
"We'd had a number of inquiries, including some very, very serious ones," Charles said. "And about the time we were possibly going to act on one of those, these guys - our employees - said they'd like to do it, and that just changed the ball game entirely."
Wallace, the only full-time employee at the winery, led the way. She works in the tasting room and in sales and wanted to keep the company local.
"I joke that it seemed easier to buy the company than find a new job that I like," Wallace said.
For the Dodges, this was by far the best way to leave the business.
"We've always enjoyed working with our employees," Charles said. "They put together a team. They have very different skills, so now we have this incredible range of skills here."
Employee ownership
Vermont has a number of employee-owned businesses, led by large companies like King Arthur Flour.
In Windham County, Chroma Technology in Bellows Falls is employee-owned, as are Austin Design Cooperative and the Vermont Trust Company in Brattleboro, Bazin Brothers Trucking in Westminster, Deconstruction Works in Dummerston, and the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, which may be the oldest worker cooperative in the state.
In all, approximately 40 companies in Vermont are fully employee-owned, and another 20 give employees a partial ownership stake, according to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC), which provides outreach and technical support for retiring business owners in the state who are exploring employee ownership in their succession planning.
As described on its website, "Vermont stands out as a leader in the employee ownership movement with more worker cooperatives per capita than any other state as well as an impressive number of employee owners working at companies with an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)."
Some of the larger companies use ESOPs, where employees own stock in the company and receive a buyout when they retire. Others, smaller ones, are cooperatives like Putney Mountain Winery. Food co-ops also fall in this category.
What exactly is a co-op?
According to the Northeast Transition Initiative (NETI) website, "A worker-owned cooperative is a business that is directly owned and controlled by the people who work there. […] They are membership-based corporations or LLCs [Limited Liability Companies] operating on a one-member, one-vote basis. That said, they are usually managed much the same as any other business. Worker-owners receive a portion of the profits of the business on an annual basis and have a say in major decisions of the company, and this direct interest in the success of the business can foster a strong ownership culture."
At Putney Mountain Winery, the buy-in was $3,000 from each employee. Before anyone new is allowed to participate, they must have worked at the winery for two years and be a good fit with the other employee-owners.
The money to buy the company from the Dodges is a loan from the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast (formerly the Cooperative Fund of New England), which has financed cooperatives around New England and New York for over 50 years.
"We're a mission-driven nonprofit loan fund," said Vikas Mangipudi, the fund's Vermont and New Hampshire loan and outreach officer. "We have a $50 million loan fund, and basically we lend money to cooperatives. So in this case, we're talking about Putney Mountain Wine and Spirits, which has formed a cooperative for the employees to purchase the business that they worked for and to run it democratically."
Right now is a special time for cooperatives, Mangipudi said, noting "a whole demographic cohort of small business owners, of baby boomers, that are at retiring age."
"In a rural state, that could be a challenge, because many small business owners trying to sell their businesses don't find buyers," Mangipudi said. "Or if they do, their options are limited to things like selling to a competitor who may or may not keep running the business, or to a private equity firm that may change the way the business is run to the detriment of the employees and the community."
Employee ownership is a really powerful option in rural communities, he said, "if you have a small business, and you have employees that have worked there a long time and know how the business is run, and they are willing and able to take on the job of running it."
Once the Fermented Five decided to form a cooperative, they received help and encouragement from VEOC and the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC)
Danielle "Dani" Delaini, the assistant head of BDCC, said the agency was delighted to work with the Putney Winery employees.
"Business succession and ownership transition are pressing issues for rural economies, especially in regions like Southern Vermont, where many long-standing businesses are owned by individuals nearing retirement age," Delaini said.
"Without intentional strategies, these transitions risk resulting in business closures, job losses, and erosion of local economic resilience," she said, adding that the organization created its BDCC NEXT program and the Southern Vermont Cooperative Business Center in response to these challenges in partnership with the VEOC."
The Center is now emerging as a regional hub for both succession support and cooperative development, Delaini said.
The worker-owners of Putney Winery have actively participated in several BDCC programs designed to build entrepreneurial skills.
Members of their group took courses including BDCC's LaunchPad Program, a six-week accelerator that introduces foundational business concepts, Funding Fundamentals (a program focused on understanding and accessing local capital sources); and Buyers Working Group (a collaborative peer group aimed at building market connections and procurement readiness).
They also took advantage of one-on-one "tailored business support services."
In addition, specialized technical assistance was provided in partnership with the VEOC, with a focus on cooperative-specific business development.
Is everybody happy?
The BDCC is happy with the sale.
"The transition of Putney Mountain Winery to employee ownership under The Fermented Five LLC represents a powerful example of how legacy businesses can remain vibrant community assets through cooperative models," Delaini said.
"What could have ended with a closed door now continues with five committed worker-owners who bring hands-on experience," he continued. "These individuals are not just new owners, they are already rooted in the daily operations, which provides stability and continuity as the business enters a new chapter."
The lenders are happy with the sale.
"We're very happy to support them," said Dorian Gregory, the deputy executive director of the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast. "This is an experienced group of folks who are passionate about the work that they're doing. They're embedded in the community. They have a good product that they could continue to market and operate. These are the kinds of basics that you look for in small business success."
And the Dodges are happy with the sale.
"I'm a kind of a slow learner," Charles said. "It took me a long time to figure out how to make wine, and we've had a successful business. It feels good to sell, because I think I'm not probably going to learn that much more. But there's so much more to learn."
And so, he said, "the next generation can start where we are and go with it."
"I think that's the right way to do it," Charles said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.