Club Newsletter March 2025

YOU’RE INVITED! Join us April 25-27 for our 2025 Spring Club Weekend event where you, our valued members, will create Seven Birches’ next wine blend! Here is a quick overlook of what the weekend entails!

• Warm-up educational sessions to become master wine blenders
• Conduct bench trials to identify effective components for the blend
• Calculate exact percentages of wines in the new blend
• Friday night tasting of the latest releases during the opening social.
• Optional vineyard walk & talk with vineyard managers on Saturday morning
• Group session with sommelier Missa Capozzo on all things wine!
• Split into two groups: one blending with Winemaker Nathan, the other conducting a blind tasting with owner Mark

The 2025 Spring Release wines are here! As a reminder, credit cards will be charged on April 15th. For those attending our Spring Club Weekend, your wines will be available for pick-up at the event weekend. If you’re thinking about booking, now is the time to do so! We will begin shipping wine on Wednesday, April 30th, so please keep an eye out for your package and ensure that someone is home to sign for it. Please make any necessary changes to your account BEFORE April 14th. Not seeing the wines that you want this Spring? We’re sorry, but we won’t be able to accommodate any substitutions this year because of our limited inventory. However, we’d love for you to check out our subscription club! It’s a great way for YOU to control the wines you want, when you want them, and as often as you’d like! IF you need help switching membership options, or if you need to make any changes/updates to your payment information on file, please reach out to [email protected].

2025 Spring Mostly Whites Club Tasting Notes

2025 Spring Mostly Reds Club Tasting Notes

2025 Spring Variety Club Tasting Notes

• April 17 – Spring Flower and Design Workshop – TICKETS
• May 8  – Charcuterie Making & Wine Tasting – TICKETS

It’s officially March; the days are longer and warmer bringing with it some of my favorite days on the mountain, Spring Skiing. The mountains have turned off their snowmaking machines and we ride out the remainder of the snow that mother nature has gifted us. Layers are peeled away, to only an open jacket or less, and Apres ski takes on a different meaning as the sun is still shining long after the lifts have closed for the day. As you make your way up to visit us this month you’ll find the air a bit sweeter in New Hampshire right now. It’s Maple Madness here in New Hampshire for the rest of the month. This is the time of year when the sap from the maple trees flows and all the local sugar houses are boiling off the excess water from the sap to make Maple Syrup. Just about anywhere you go in this state you’ll see steam rising from sugar shacks. This upcoming weekend, March 15th, is the big state wide event. Sugar houses all over the state are opening their doors to the public to see how it’s all done, most will have food and other fun happenings for the whole family. We here at Rhythm Ciders caught the maple fever as well. We have just released our limited edition Maple Cider. Our fantastic tasting room staff also set up a whole maple platter to complement this deliciously smooth Maple Cider. It’s been flying out of the tap lines so fast that I am already planning on making more just to get through the month.

Now while we are talking about low inventory and the need to make more product, I wanted to expand this topic to our wines as well. Every winery’s inventory is directly related to the amount of production tanks, barrel storage, and finished bottle storage available. Time is also a huge factor. Unlike cider which only takes about 6-8 weeks to make from start to finish wine needs a lot more time. A white wine is typically at least one year old before it is served and red wine is closer to two full years. Our old production space, in the old wing of the resort, was 1,000 sq ft; in the wine industry it is said that a winery can, on average, make one case of wine per year for each square foot of their production space. Going by this math our old production room should only have been producing about 1,000 cases a year, but call it 2,000 because we get two grape harvests a year, northern hemisphere and southern. However we had to stay in the old production room for almost an additional three years longer than we were originally planning. The delay of building the new wing of the resort was caused, largely by Covid-19. By the time we moved out of that old room in the summer of 2024 we were averaging around 5,000+ cases of wine and an additional 2,000-3,000 cases of cider. Trust me when I tell you that we used every inch of available space we had to make this even possible. The amount we produced in 2023, which was our last grape harvest in the old production room, was enough to keep up with current demand, but we were not able to produce enough to bolster our inventory of aging wine. So how are we correcting this? We moved into our current cellar in the new wing of the River Walk Resort which is six times the size of our old room. So what are we doing with this new, much needed space? We are producing the most wine we will have ever produced with the fall harvest of 2024 and the spring harvest of 2025. Our plan is that we will bottle about half of the volume of red wine we produce, in this time period, slightly on the younger side, and let the remaining volume of red wine age. This will let us keep up with the current demand, letting you come and enjoy a delicious albeit slightly lighter wine and then let us stash the remaining volumes away, in oak, to age for an additional year or so creating that large bold red I know some of you absolutely love. The plan is much the same for white wines as well. We are currently serving our whites from the 2024 harvest. These whites are crisp, refreshing, young, and fun. They are absolutely perfect for the warm long days ahead of us. We made and bottled a good amount of white wine from the 2024 harvest which will last through all or most of the summer. Then for the 2025 spring harvest we are going BIG with white wine. We are hoping to produce enough white wine in this harvest so it will last through spring of 2026; which would mean that the Fall 2025 harvest white wines will be able to age till or almost their full year before we serve them to you. I ask that you please bear with us, and understand the limited selection, with some on the younger side, of the wines you are able to choose from for your subscription club is only temporary. Gage and I are making as much as we can, and from the bottom of our hearts we promise you we would never serve you anything that I would not personally pour at a dinner party for my friends and family.

Currently, in the cellar, Gage and I are starting to bottle the 2023 Reds. Some of these will be going into the spring club shipment and they will be our red line up for the summer. We are hitting all the old red classics with this bottling; the 2023 Rebel (Cab heavy), 2023 Sunset red, 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon, 2023 Merlot, 2023 Syrah. They are all absolutely fantastic. The Rebel, Cab, and Syrah are all big, bold, and packed with tannins; while the Sunset and Merlot are extremely pleasant, fantastically balanced, lighter, and easy drinking. I hope you all enjoy these as much as I enjoyed making them. Definitely don’t miss the chance to try our maple cider, I’ve also heard talks of Rhythm Tap and Grill using this one in their snake bite drink (Guinness beer on top of the Rhythm Maple cider). We have also released our Honey Cider and Hopped cider in cans. We are extremely proud of the 5 hard ciders we now have circulating in cans all over the state. Check out our website for a map of all retail and restaurant locations carrying our ciders.

Finally, Gage and I have just racked our 2024 Rose wine made from majoritively our grapes from our vineyard located at the RiverWalk. Oh my gosh are we excited for this one to be released, probably some time this summer. While it hasn’t been officially decided yet we are playing with the idea of making 2024 Rose Wine sparkling and maybe even put it into slim cans so it’s easier and safer to bring with you to the water all summer long.

Be well my friends, and remember we made it through the winter. There’s nothing but long summer days and cool breezes in our future. I raise my glass to you all, thank you for coming along on this ride with us.