Ultimate Winemaking Experience

If you answer yes to any of those questions, then you may want to read on. Seven Birches Winery, located inside the grand new RiverWalk Resort at Loon Mountain in the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire has the ultimate wine-making experience. From start to finish, wine is custom-made with input and help from you, to handcraft your special variety or blend. At the end, the wine is uniquely yours to keep, give away to friends and family, and/or trade with others. This unique experience gets you involved from the very beginning and is different from other “white label” bottling services. You may consider yourself the “Winemakers’ Assistant” when you dig in and work with the team to make your special wine.

When you first sign up for the Seven Birches Barrel Club, you’ll be contacted directly to set up a “wine planning” kickoff meeting with Mark, our winemaker (and winery owner).   He will meet with you to have a chat about the wine (usually end up tasting some wine too) that you are interested in making.  Starting with very broad decisions and getting more specific as you go on, you’ll decide things like the following:

• What fruit are we going to use?  Grapes?  Something else?
• If grapes, what variety of grapes are we going to use?  Reds, whites?
• What part of the world will these grapes come from?  California?  South America?
• What is the desired end product and when (approximately) would we like to have it finished?

By the end of this first meeting, we will have a very good plan for the style of wine that we are going to make over the next year or so.  That’s right, it is going to take about a year (at least) to make your wine, so plenty of time to make more fine-tuning decisions as we go.

Once we have your grapes (or other fruit) picked out and plans for the finished product, we can get to work.  It starts with crush, then press, racking, and eventually on to bottling.  At each step, we’ll let you know what is planned and give you the opportunity to join us.  We’ll keep you in the loop at each step on our winemaking blog, so you can read about what is done, check out the pictures, and share with your friends.  If you’ve chosen to get involved… even better.  You’ll be in the pictures and you’ll have a first hand observation of your wine’s development.  Cool right?  And, we are located in a world-class hotel, so staying overnight during your visit is a snap, with all the creature comforts of home.

At the end of the winemaking cycle, you’ll have ownership of your wine, in the bottle, with your own label.  Just to give you an idea, one barrel is 24 cases (288 bottles) of finished wine.  So, this is perfect for sharing, trading, and storing for the future.

Intrigued?  Contact Us today for more information and a consultation with our winemaker.

Barrel Club Pricing

As a barrel club owner, you’ll be the winemakers’ assistant.  You’ll have the opportunity to get involved in any or all of the following decisions, processes, and milestones:

1. Wine Planning Meeting – discuss the end product and the process.
2. Grape Crush – when the grapes arrive and fermentation is started.
3. Wine Press – when the grapes are pressed and transferred.
4. Racking – when the wine is racked off its sediment (several times).
5. Barrel Tasting – while the wine is in barrel (or tank) aging.
6. Finished Product Planning Meeting – bottle, cork, label design decisions.
7. Final Tasting – decision to bottle the wine.
8. Filtering – just before bottling.
9. Bottling – filling, corking, capping and labeling.
10. Keeping/Sharing/Storing – You’re wine is now in the club.