Last week I went to St. Louis for a mead competition, partly for the brilliant pun possibilities, but really because of a few sips of pyment I had earlier this year in Texas.
A pyment is a co-ferment of honey and grapes, something I didn’t know until Alisha Blackwell-Calvert, one of my fellow judges at the TexSom International Wine Awards, gave me a few sips of one she had made with Bluewood Brewing in St. Louis. It combined the pretty floral/peachy notes of Riesling with the wispy, heathery character of wildflower honey and walked the tightrope of freshness, delicacy and subtle power all at once. I was smitten.
A few months later, Alisha reached out to ask if I would like to judge the National Honey Board’s Mead Crafter’s Competition in St. Louis and I gave her a quick yes (and a few terrible puns.)
The competition is part of the National Honey Board’s mission to promote the use of honey as an ingredient in foods and beverages. This focus on finding ways to use honey in higher value-added end products is right in line with what we’re seeing throughout the agricultural/beverage production chain. As local produce, potatoes and grains are turned into (hopefully) profitable, delicious end products, it makes sense for honey to follow the same path. And as we see more farms turning to regenerative principles and the polyculture that comes with it, this could lead to a rise in beekeeping and honey production…and hopefully mead as profitable end use.
Sitting in the low-key grandeur of the Lemp Mansion Grand Hall, the tasting felt like the beginning of something. Now that’s a very silly thing to write, because mead has been around for a very, very long time. Mainstream food and beverage media most often associate it with Renaissance Fairs and the Game of Thrones. Vikings and Shakespeare sometimes get a mention. And maybe Aristotle.
But mead predates all of that. With roots in Africa, Asia, and Indigenous communities around the globe, it’s likely the oldest fermented beverage in our human history. I started this article way too late to fully go down the research rabbit hole, but there are studies that definitively date mead production to 7000 BC China. And there’s no logical way to assume that mead didn’t originate in Africa, where the climate is just right for natural production in the hollowed out trunks of Baobab trees.
My own experience with mead dates back to the early twenty-tens (at least an eon, in NYC wine shop terms.) I stocked some of the first bottlings of Enlightenment Wines’ evocatively named Last Gift of My Daemon Lover. Those bottles had a good chance of foaming over when we opened them, but the liquid that remained was tasty and intriguing. A bit after that, I had some sips of Ferme Apicole Desrochers mead aged under flor at a party on my rooftop and was, well, floored. Five years later, that Canadian mead would finally make it onto my shop’s shelves, the Enlightenment Wines offerings would expand to include a wide range of delightful (non-foaming) bottlings incorporating locally sourced fruits and herbs, and a few other producers would join them….
I had the beginnings of a wee mead section.
But the category remains on a slow burn. Aside from a flutter of activity during the heydays of Game of Thrones, mead feels like it’s only beginning to gain a foothold with the industry’s media and buyers, especially those of us that lean to the wine-side of the business. This could be because mead lives in the same regulatory netherworld as cider and many state liquor control boards don’t really know what to do with it. It tends to get picked up by beer distributors rather than wine distributors, which can leave it nearly invisible to retail and restaurant wine buyers…and drinkers.
Which brings me to a meading of minds in St. Louis. Alisha was working with the National Honey Board to bring more wine people into the fold for the third annual Mead Crafters Competition. The board’s Keith Seiz explains, “Most mead competitions use beer judges, but most meads are more similar in nature to wines. It made sense to bring in sommeliers from around the country to strengthen the depth of each judging panel. In addition to promoting quality meads, one of our goals at the National Honey Board is to expand the market for mead. Sommeliers are the tastemakers of the restaurant and beverage industry, and the competition gives them the opportunity to taste a large array of mead styles and gain an appreciation for an oft under-appreciated beverage.”
It's a smart move. And it seems to have worked. It’s been a week and I still haven’t stopped thinking about some of the meads I tasted. To still be thinking about an event a week after it happened? That’s pretty close to forever in wine geek terms. Conversations at my table ranged from the characteristics of various single variety honeys (meadowfoam, I think I love you!) to how much is too much in terms of volatile acidity and raw honey fermentation character to how to think about the structural elements of acidity and alcohol.
It was thrilling to be finding my footing on the fly, learning to describe what I was tasting without being able to fall back on years of study of a formalized language. And it was thrilling to be able to taste such a wide variety of meads in one place. Which variety of honey works best with which botanicals, grapes, apples or grain? Which works best on its own? Are we talking melomel or pyment, cyser or braggot? Hydromel, standard or sack strength? Sparkling or still? This is a beverage that offers all sorts of delicious geek-out opportunities.
The category brings other opportunities as well, beyond what’s in the glass. The history of mead generally and in America specifically weaves through spaces and histories and stories that we don’t always focus on when we think about alcoholic beverages. One glance down the digital rabbit hole landed on Jill Wendholt Silva’s article about Eric Depradine’s Zydeco Meadery (see flatlandkc.org), winding its way from Trinidad to Boston, from Louisiana to Kansas, touching on land ownership and the vagaries of the TTB formula approval process.
If it seems like I’m buzzing with excitement, well, you would bee right!
