Medieval No More
The idea of drinking mead may conjure up the image of thick steins and medieval taverns, but a few local meaderies are bringing the 10,000-year-old libation into the future.
Mead is essentially a honey wine and traditionally made with honey, water and yeast. The ancient Chinese, Indians, Egyptians and Greeks all documented drinking mead, as did the Vikings, Germans and Celts. It seemed that everyone was knocking back goblets of what the Greeks called the “nectar of the Gods,” however, during the 1700s, grape wine experienced a renaissance, and mead fell out of favour.
These days people are looking to drink mead for different reasons. Yes, mead sales increased exponentially throughout the hype over Game of Thrones, but Emily Vanderschee, co-owner of Kelowna’s Meadow Vista Honey Wines along with her sister, Electra, believes people find mead appealing because they are looking for alternative craft beverages with a sustainable twist.
“It's old-new,” Vanderschee says. “Kids in schools are learning about bees and pollination, and now they are growing up and are asking questions about what they are drinking and eating.”
Vanderschee wanted to make mead that was dry enough to be paired with food, much like wine, which is fitting, considering she worked in the wine industry for many years.
She opened Meadow Vista Honey Wines on her five-acre property home to 110 hives and produces 50 different honey wines, including a sparkling mead line called Bliss, which Vanderschee says people have “gone bonkers for” over the last year.
“I love the wine industry, but I wanted to do something sustainable and that I felt had a positive environmental impact,” Vanderschee says. “I know there are wineries [that] are trying to be organic, [but] there are still so many hundreds of thousands of acres being sprayed. With beekeeping, you can't spray because you will kill the bees, so you are immediately in line with a no-spray model.”
Beekeeping also promotes biodiversity. Wineries, generally, plant one crop — grapes. Since grapes don’t need bees to pollinate them and are often sprayed, bees don’t always thrive in wine regions. However, those grape growers and any growers who promote biodiversity reap the benefits of having nutrient-dense organic matter in the soil, regulating the amount of nitrogen, making for a healthier crop. For biodiversity to take place, bees must do the pollinating.
While some beekeepers use monocropping to develop a particular flavour of honey, such as clover or blueberry, Vanderschee uses a wildflower honey, mostly from her own farm. It gives her mead a unique flavour that reflects her property’s terroir.
“Make haste slowly”
Teresa Townsley, co-owner of Festina Lente Estate Winery and meadery in Langley, takes on the same philosophy when it comes" "to making mead that has a small footprint. She and her husband, Bill, who is a beekeeper, use ingredients either harvested from their five-acre farm or neighbouring farms.
“Beekeeping is a passion,” Townsley says. “It's a deep connection to the environment and there's a huge sense of pride when you put honey on the table, and we feel the same way about our mead.”
Mead also appeals to Townsley for more, let’s say, romantic reasons. She is a huge fan of historical fiction, where mead is often the drink of choice for characters in bygone eras.
“We wanted to make products that were accurate to 11th- and 12th-century recipes, when mead was much drier than what people think it is nowadays,” Townsley says. “I really want to stress that mead is not necessarily sweet and can be dry, off-dry and semi-sweet, much like wine.”
Unlike wine, which is categorized by grape variety, mead is categorized in styles, more like beer. A melomel is mead with fruit added; a metheglin is spiced with aromatics such as cinnamon and nutmeg; a pyment is grape and honey hybrid wine, while a cysur combines honey and apple cider. The combinations of flavours are endless and Townsley plays with flavours such as plum, fig and even garlic, all grown on her own land or neighbouring farms.
She also calls on history for branding inspiration, using Latin to name her products with handles such as Sacramentum and Saturnalia. Even Festina Lente is Latin — it means “make haste slowly.”
And now for something completely different
While Festina Lente and Meadow Vista choose to make honey wines, the two owners of Humblebee Mead are taking the beverage in an entirely different direction.
In recent years, craft ready-to-drink beverages have hit an all-time high. Beer was once the only thing you could find in a can; now, all manner of spirits such as vodka and soda and gin and tonic can be found clutched in any partygoer’s hand. Jeff Gillham and Pierre Vacheresse wanted to make mead a more accessible option by putting it in a can.
“Instead of what you would traditionally see around here, which is much more wine-like, we are trying to showcase our mead more like a cider,” Vaceheresse says.
Humblebee mead sits comfortably between craft beer and craft cider in the liquor store fridges and sits at about the same alcohol volume of 5.5 per cent at most.
“A lot of people use champagne yeast because that yeast works well with higher sugars,” Vacheresse says. “We're using yeasts that give it a more beer-like profile.”
Vacheresse and Gillham got into making mead around the same time that the craft beer revolution was kicking off and officially""launched Humblebee in 2015. The two worked at the same restaurant and after work, one day, they went for a round of golf. Vacheresse paid for the round, while Gillham brought the beer.
“We were on the third hole and he pulled out the unlabelled bottle, which I didn’t want,” Vacheresse says. “He was really into brewing at home at the time, and this was similar, but honey-based instead.”
Vacheresse was pleasantly surprised and the two decided to give mead-making a real shot. They bootstrapped the operation and within a year, they upped their production capacity from 20 litres to 2,000 litres. The two have expanded the line to include unusual flavours such as orange and saffron, green tea and keffir lime and hibiscus and lavender, with equally unusual names such as Champion of the Sun and It’s Business Time.
Unlike Meadow Vista and Festina Lente, Humblebee is not made on pastoral farmland. It’s made in Vancouver, using honey sourced from Manitoba, which produces about 20 per cent of all the honey in Canada. The gents use goldenrod and wildflower honey from one family farm to maintain consistency.
“One year, we used a slightly different honey and you can tell the difference,” Vacheresse says. “When the fermentation begins and it's still a bit sweet, the flavours of the pollen are subtle, but when it is really dry, you can taste the difference. Drinking mead, let alone drinking carbonated mead from a can, is a new concept for many, and the stretch for the two mead-makers is convincing" "people to get past their preconceived notions.
“The issue is that our mead is so different that people who have had mead don't think it's mead or they've been turned off by the sweetness of some honey wines,” Vacheresse says.
This year, they were able to keg their mead, which is slightly bad timing due to the diminished restaurant market, but they’ve seen a rise in popularity among retail consumers, alongside the rise in popularity of craft ciders, particularly among women.
“As we've gone along our people have evolved, but, for the most part, the people who drink our mead are looking for an alternative to beer, but still want that craft experience,” Vacheresse says.
Festina Lente Estate Winery
21113 16th Ave., Langley, B.C.
festinalente.ca | 604.510.2336 | @festinalentewinery
Humblebee Mead
humblebeemead.com | 604.764.5903 | @humblebeemead
Meadow Vista Honey Wines
3975 June Springs Rd., Kelowna, B.C.
meadowvista.ca | 250.862.2337 | @meadowvistahoney
