Whenever I hear or read the term “melomel” I start drooling because my mind’s eye is immediately filled with visions of fried chicken, mac & cheese, fried catfish, peach cobbler, and all the other soul food staples. That part of my brain that deals with food, the stomach – er, the hypothalamus, I mean - my hypothalamus confuses “melomel” with Melly Mell’s, Madison’s premier purveyor of soul food.
Melomel has absolutely nothing to do with any of the tasty foods above nor their equally tasty associates like ribs, collard greens, banana pudding…well, you get the idea. Instead melomel is fancy term for mead made with fruit. Apparently it comes from the Latin word melomeli which referred to – would you believe it? – honey wine made with fruit juice. It sounds pretty fancy so I suspect it was reserved for the more patrician types like those senators who had their own luxury skyboxes at the Coliseum.
If the Romans were drinking strawberry melomeli back in the day, instead of, say, grape melomeli, which is known as pyment today for reasons unknown, it was surely a bit different than the strawberry melomel made by White Winter Winery, the subject of this blog post. Not only would the honey have been different but the strawberries as well. Apparently the delectable little red bundles of sweet, fruity goodness we know and love today were initially bred by a French person in the mid-18th century. This person let a strawberry from the American colonies schtup one from Chile or however you do it. (Fruit husbandry is not my area of expertise.) The Romans would have been using a different variety native to Europe, presumably.
The strawberry is a member of the rose family and, according to Wikipedia, those aren’t seeds on the outside aren’t seeds. They’re “actually one of the ovaries of the flower, with a seed inside it.” So remember, you’re eating ovaries when you pop a ripe, succulent strawberry in your mouth.
As with my previous mead commentary, honey here means what I think of as your garden variety sticky golden stuff with an earthy-vanilla flavor over here and a floral taste over there. The thing is, honey varieties can have rather different tastes depending on where the bees source their nectar. I can find no indication of what kinds of bees or honeys White Winter uses.
White Winter does say, though, that their Strawberry Mead is made with their dry mead, the subject of my last White Winter post, which has had the fruit added along the way at some point.
The odd thing is, for a drink with strawberries, it isn’t very red. It’s more of a gold with a red tint to it. Still, considering the straight dry mead looked almost like water, this stuff has a lot of color to it. This mead is clear and still, i.e. – no fizziness. As expected, the aroma was of strawberry and honey yet it wasn’t particularly sweet smelling. Also, it smelled boozy to my nose with it being 11.something% A.B.V.
With no carbonation, my tongue was treated to a mighty smooth sip. Like the dry variety it is built from, it has a medium-light body and this, along with the smoothness, makes it go down very easily. The honey flavor is most prominent with strawberry being little more than an accent when the mead was cold. However, as it warmed, the strawberry taste grew stronger and fuller. After swallowing, the honey flavor faded quickly but the strawberry hung on for a bit. Then the tannins and booziness kicked in to make for a rather dry finish.
I found Strawberry Mead to be a bit drier than the dry mead that was not fruitified. I have to wonder if a trick is being played on my tongue with the strawberry adding a touch of sweetness as well as a fruity flavor and this threw the dryness into sharp relief. Or some such thing. The key is to let it warm up a little so that the strawberry flavor becomes more pronounced because it is delicious. Still, the dryness, perceived or real, was just a bit too much for me. It didn’t render Strawberry Mead undrinkable, but I definitely liked the Dry better.
Junk food pairing: I like to offset the dryness of Strawberry Mead with my food pairings. A long-time favorite is chocolate whipped topping on vanilla wafers.
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