Winemaker’s Notes for February, 2025

Greetings again from the wine crafting cellar at Hermit Woods Winery.  

Ken and assistant winemaker Ben have been busy in the first month of 2025.  

• We bottled our very popular Crabapple Cider in early January.  This product is only made when we have enough Dolgo crabapples and we did in 2024, so here it is again for your pleasure.
• Our very popular Cranberry and Blueberry Hard Ciders need to be made every few months to keep the product in stock and to keep it fresh.  We made a batch of each in January and will plan to can and bottle these later this winter/spring..
• We also made a batch of local hard cider with juice from Apple Hill Farm in Concord, NH.  This cider will be blended with honey and lavender later this spring for release in late May as our very popular Honey Lavender Cider.
• Our 2023 vintage of Red Scare was ready for bottling, so that was also completed this January – an excellent vintage.
• Because we have our own canning line now, we offer our three pink wines in both bottles and cans: Heirloom Crabapple (aka ‘Dolgo’), Strawberry-Rhubarb (aka ‘Cirque du Strawberry’), and Winnipessaukee Rose.  In January, we canned up some of our Rose, in both ‘fish’ and ‘Mt. Washington’ label format.
• After many bench trials, we were also ready to assemble some of our wines made by blending different wines together: “Spring in Session” and “Meredith Bay White.”  The former is a blend of a rhubarb mead, three honey wine, and water.  We hope to have this canned for the Spring Solstice in late-March.  Meredith Bay White (MBW) is a blend of a peach-rhubarb wine with wine made from cold hardy kiwi berries.  In 2024, we explored 6 different kiwi berry varieties and, after taking tasting notes, we combined these into MBW.  A couple of the trials, and one in particular, were found to make excellent wine based on the kiwi berry alone – look for that perhaps in the future.

Hope to see you here soon; stop by the cellar anytime. 

Cheers!

Ken