Although the reputation of mead and fruit wine has suffered in recent decades, there are many high-quality examples of these ancient beverages being made today, offering adventurous consumers and beverage professionals an exciting alternative to wine, beer, and spirits.
Mead is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey. Honey is thought to have first fermented naturally in the wild, where it was found and consumed by both humans and animals. The so-called magic bag theory postulates that these natural fermentations occurred when water, which is necessary for mead production, entered beehives, tree crevices, or bags that were used to store honey.
Traces of honey and beeswax have been found at archeological sites worldwide. The earliest-dated alcoholic beverage, made of honey fermented with hawthorn and rice, was discovered by Patrick McGovern at a site in Jiahu, a Neolithic settlement on China’s Yellow River, and dated to 7000 BCE. Mead is also a traditional African beverage, and fermented honey products were discovered in King Tut’s tomb.
In recent history, however, mead has had a poor reputation, largely because of the low-quality, inexpensive honey wines made for Renaissance fairs and by amateur mead makers attempting to produce the beverage at home. Yet the best meaderies and fruit wine producers craft their products using classic winemaking techniques, focusing their efforts on agricultural practices and terroir.
The process of making mead is very similar to that of making wine, but the primary fermentable sugar comes from honey instead of grapes. Meaderies in the United States and the United Kingdom are licensed as wineries at the federal level and are subject to the same rules and regulations as producers of grape wine. In other countries, including the Netherlands, mead is regulated in the same category as beer, and, as such, meaderies are licensed as breweries.
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