Wilder on Wine: Catch the Buzz

A recent dinner at Sylvan Park restaurant Miel (which means "honey" in Spanish and French) was capped off with an unexpectedly delicious treat: a demi-tasse sized spoon bearing a dark, amber-colored artesian honey from Goodlettesville, with a single tiny fennel seed suspended in the rich depths of the nectar.

I rarely use honey at home and have tasted few honeys that didn't come out of a plastic, bear-shaped squeezable bottle. But that honey was so delicious. It seemed to hit some primordial taste bud that leads humans to search out high-calorie foods, rewarding them for their ingestion of such things with a barrage of pleasurable endorphins sent straight from the taste buds.

Granted, one spoonful of honey was plenty; sweetness is best in moderation. I couldn't help just grinning after licking every last little bit off the spoon, feeling somewhat like Winnie-the-Pooh, reveling in the purely instinctual delight of its deliciousness.

And it made me think about honey's application in the drinking world, specifically, its use in meads. Drinks don't get much more ancient than mead. Mead is made when naturally occurring yeasts in the honey combine with water and spontaneously ferment. To prevent this from happening in the hive, the worker bees rapidly fan the honey with their wings, evaporating the water, which is necessary for fermentation to take place. Apparently bees are not into intoxication.

Ancient people, however, were. Discovering the potency of accidentally fermented honey, they began courting the process. Meads were especially popular with the Egyptians, Vikings, and Celts.

A lot of meads have a very viscous texture and an overpowering sweetness. This type of mead has led many who do not favor overt sweetness to dismiss the beverage.

But not all meads are like that. A few months ago, I very skeptically tried a new line of meads out of Boulder, Co., and was very pleasantly surprised by how complex they were.

The producer is called Redstone Meadery. My favorite was their basic Traditional Mountain Honey Wine ($19 for 750mL, Lipman Brothers Distributors). The majority of the honey used for this mead comes from bees with a preference for orange blossoms. Made by hand in small batches, the nose is intensely floral, waxy and rich. Yet the beverage is actually quite light on the palate and easy to drink, with a hint of clovery funk and a surprising amount of spiciness on the finish. It's got enough sweetness to go well with desserts or spicy foods, but it's kept from going over the top by a nice acidity. I'd recommend pouring it in four-ounce glasses, like a dessert wine.

It's made with no added sulfites or preservatives but thanks in part to its convenient resealable bottle and mead's natural resistance to oxidation, it will last from three weeks to a month after opening. So there's no pressure to drink it all at once — keep it around for an occasional glass.

The "Meadery" also offers several sparkling meads that they call "elixers," which are enhanced by
fruit juices for those who like it sweet, and one which is dry hopped for those that don't. For the super sweet toothed, the Vanilla Bean and Cinnamon Mead is like a cinnamon bun in a glass — pretty decadent and not a bad way to start out your Sunday morning!

As I discovered at Miel, a drop of honey on the tongue is like nature's Zoloft: an instant mood elevator. As the Redstone Meadery's slogan goes, "Feel the love, and catch the buzz."