Club News with Faith
Faith Cunningham, Wine Club Concierge
Season’s Greetings from Seven Birches Winery and Rhythm Ciders!
While much of your holiday gifts may be stuck on shipping containers in the middle of the ocean, that’s not the case with our handcrafted local wines and ciders! Take advantage of your club member perks and give the gift of wine!
FREE SHIPPING thru December 21st! This will ensure your package arrives to your loved ones in time for Christmas!
But wait, there’s MORE! Soon, you’ll have access to the Nouveau bottling releases of the following:
- 2020 Sunset Red (Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot blend)
- 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon
- 2020 Merlot
- 2020 Syrah
- 2020 Pinot Noir
- Legacy (v5)
Stay tuned for release information and when they are available for purchase. Until then, enjoy FREE SHIPPING and Happy Holidays!
Tasting Room News with Brian & Katie
Tasting Room Managers in Training
Everyone has changed their decorations for the new season and we have a little change of our own at Studio! We have moved away from “create your own flight of 5 for $15” where you wait for each pour after you’ve finished the previous. Now you can choose our White Wine flight, Red Wine flight, Fruit Wine flight, or our Cider Flight and enjoy all FOUR at once on a wooden paddle for $12. Additional samples from other flights are available to add on for $3, so the price per sample hasn’t changed; try them all! Gone are the days of wondering whether your first pour was as good as the last, try them side by side! With 4 options for each flight, we have more samples available than ever and those who prefer one type of wine to another can enjoy an entire flight of just that type. We will be open only Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays into the first few weeks of January, but we will ramp up our hours around Christmas time. See you soon and Happy Holidays!
The Riverwalk Tasting Room has been enjoying the festive company of New Hampshirites as they work through the wineries participating in the Jingle Bells Winery Tour, which has been a fun way to explore the wines of our state. To those who have come in to ask about Sunset Red and Cabernet Sauvignon, never fear! We’ve been watching the production crew set the stage for bottling fresh vintages of all of our best-selling reds. They’ll surely keep you warm all winter long. Make sure to stop in for a glass after a long day of skiing, and meet our newest crew member, Mia! She’s a senior at Plymouth State studying business, and we are very excited to have her on the team.
Save the date!
2022 Spring Release Party
April 8-10, 2022 we will host our Spring Release Party. If you were at the last one, this Fall 2021, then you’ll love what we have in store for the Spring. Stay tuned for more information on the itinerary for the weekend and your chance to buy early bird tickets.
Production News with Nate
Nate Maser, Assistant Winemaker
Happy Holidays from the winemaking crew!
We love this time of year as we transition from heavy winemaking, back to cider making and later mead making and seltzer making. We just received our glass bottles for this December bottling run of some of your favorite reds. In total, we will be bottling 18 barrels from the 2020 vintage. That is a relatively small bottling for us at 5400 bottles (450 cases) or so.
We have also received a grand total of 7 totes (1925 gallons) of sweet pressed apple cider (juice) from Windy Ridge Orchard, Cardigan Mountain Orchard, and Applecrest Farm Orchard. These totes are being stored outside (natural refrigeration this time of year) until we complete our bottling and make room in tanks. Bottle the barrels, move reds from tanks to barrels, make room for cider…. in that order!
The first cider we’ll be making is our Hard Blood Orange Cider sold under our Rhythm Ciders Brand. We learned a great deal from our first batch, which people loved and which we sold out of a few months ago. We learned that we want to increase the concentration of oranges fermenting with the juice and we want to reduce the rind inclusion in the must. This will give it a more pronounced citrus, with less bitterness. We think we got it this time!
Soon, you’ll be able to try (if you didn’t get to taste during the fall release party) our Rhythm Meads. We have bottled our Apple Cider Mead and we are just waiting on labels for it. Then, we’ll let you know when you can try/buy.
Also – stay tuned for our Rhythm Hard Seltzers. We have our Hard Blueberry Seltzer made and bottled, just awaiting labels. And, our Hard Peach Seltzer is in tank now. All wonderful stuff that we can’t wait to get into our tasting rooms.
We hope you are enjoying the holidays and we look forward to seeing you next year! Cheers!
Holiday Deals!
- Club Members – FREE UPS Ground SHIPPING through Tuesday, 12/21/21.
Wine Tidbits
Oak Barrel Aging! Why in the world would we continue to use the oldest, dirtiest, heaviest, most cumbersome possible container to age our wines in? If you think about it, we have the technology now to make vessels out of stainless steel, concrete, glass, plastic and just about any material on the planet, yet we continue to use thousands years old methods, oak barrels. There must be something important right?
Most people think that it is to add oak flavor. Well, that is a side effect to other reasons. In fact, we could simply add oak chips or oak dust to the wine to get oak flavor, if we wanted it. There’s more.
First of all, wood is porous, so that the wine inside gets to interact with the air in the room, at very low levels. Specifically, the oxygen in the air, allows the wine inside to micro-oxidize over a long period of time. Secondly, the barrels provide a different type of complex polyphenols known as tannins. The tannins from the oak bond with the tannins from grape skins and seeds to create a smoother texture and more enjoyable flavor. Thirdly, the wine inside is actually drying out. Because the barrels are wood, they act like sponges, soaking the water and alcohol from the wine through the staves and evaporating both in to the room, leaving behind a more condensed wine with more pronounced flavors. Monthly, we have to top up the barrels with more wine to replace the “Angels Share” that has evaporated out.
All of these reasons and the benefit of time, make barrel aging a very important part of our red wine program. We are starting to explore how different wood origins (French v. American) and different toast levels (medium, medium +, heavy toast) affect the wine over time.
Plus… they’re so pretty.
