Club Newsletter January 2024

Another year down and another bottle of wine empty. Be sure to replenish your wine cabinet this January with our free shipping promo running all month long. The production room is as busy as ever. Paul and I are continuing to make more cider than Rhythm has ever made to date. One of my main focuses right now is to find, decide, and experiment with different hops for our brand new Rhythm Hopped Cider. Hops are all new for me; as I assume you could have guessed I mostly drink wine and cider and not a whole lot of beer. My days are filled with research and experiments. By the end of January/ beginning of February my first round of hopped cider experiments will be given to the Studio to start tasting. Come on by and help me out, I need your input. I want to know what you like about it and, honestly almost more importantly, what you don’t like about them. I’m not satisfied with this first batch so I will be starting my second round of hopped cider experiments in a few weeks and would love to hear all of your thoughts on the first go. Also, my intention is that you folks can join me in this journey from start to finish. Come taste the first experiment and then cheers with me when I nail it down as an official bottled and labeled product. During the last week of January we will be bottling the 2023 strawberry and blueberry wines. It’s a great time for me to gain a few tanks back and we want to give the wine about three to six months in the bottle before we release it to all the folks who love their sweet wines. Once wine goes into a bottle it can undergo a short period of what’s called “bottle shock.” Bottle shock, sometimes called “bottle sickness,” describes a recently packaged or shipped wine that tastes temporarily “dumb,” or with aromas and flavors that have seemingly shut down. It often occurs in wines that have been jostled for an extended period, like when it goes from tank or barrel through the bottling line. We want to give the wine enough time to settle down and “open up” before you pour it into a glass.

We here at Seven Birches are lifting a glass to all of you in cheers for making it through another year. May this new year bring you smooth sailing with the sun on your face and the wind at your back.