Romani bibeunt melomelium!

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.

Honeymakers Local 151: Dry Mead by White Winter Winery

Perhaps, if Grendel had been treated a bit better in his youth instead of being cast out to stew in the toxic juices of resentment and bloodlust and Hrothgar and his pals could have had some courtesy and been open to keeping the noise down at Heorot, maybe, just maybe, Beowolf could have brought the aggrieved parties together over a glass of mead and found some kind of détente. You know, like Nixon going to China.

But no. Instead the bloodshed reached a fever pitch as some poor Geats became the plat du jour at Grendel's grisly table before Beowolf relieved the chef himself of one of his arms followed by his life. Heeding the Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye, Grendel's mother sets out to exact revenge but ends up losing her life too. A truly ghastly affair.

Luckily I can enjoy mead today without fear that some hideous, bloodthirsty monster is going to burst in and start eating my kith and kin.

I think I have some kind of atavistic impulse to drink the stuff with all of my Central and Eastern European blood. With the odd exception, I don't drink wine but rather enjoy mead. I do, however, feel bad for the bees. I mean, those bee ladies spend all this time and effort risking life and limb to gather nectar and make honey only to have some human hork it all. Let's hope honey bees never read Marx and learn about workers controlling the means of production or Locke and discover that the fruits of one's labors are your own or we could be in serious trouble.

While I don't doubt that mead's popularity has benefitted from the slow food and craft beer movements, the Boston Beer Company does not have a subsidiary dedicated to it so I think the venerable beverage has a long row to hoe before it finds wide appeal.

Although it's a niche product, there is still a fair amount of mead to be found on store shelves here in Madison. And much of it is made right here in Wisconsin. No doubt people have fermenting honey for ages here in the Land of Cheese but the progenitor of the modern meadery in our fair state is surely White Winter Winery up north in Iron River. I believe theirs was the first mead I ever tasted and I visited the place once back in 2005 returning with a large cache of fine honey wine.

Founded in 1996, they began by offering mead, dry & sweet, fruited and not, with what appears to be Boreas' face on the label just to remind everyone of how cold it gets up by Lake Superior. They have since added less wine-like meads that have less alcohol and a generous dose of fizz to their portfolio. At some point, they got into the cider business as well.

For our purposes here, I am going to blather on about their dry mead.

Looking at it, the mead is nearly colorless with only a faint yellow tint. It was crystal clear and, as they say in meady circles, still, i.e. - not fizzy. Would you believe that it smelled like honey? I know that the scent and taste of honeys will vary depending on the flowers from which the nectar was drawn but I have no idea where the honey that made this mead came from. (Is there a word like "terroir" but for flowers?) It smelled like honey, mainly. There was a mild floral sent too along with strawberry. I could also smell that astringent alcohol scent, but it wasn't unpleasant.

This stuff was smooth with a medium-light body. Light sweetness was balanced by firm dryness. It tasted like honey with its floral/earthy flavors that included something vanilla-like. The sweetness lingered a long time after swallowing but a tannin dryness eventually swept it away.

I adore this mead with its fairly light, mild taste. It's dry but not mouth puckeringly so like a red wine, but it's also not cloyingly sweet. The label says that natural flavors were added but I have no idea what they were. It simply has a lovely honey flavor and is dangerously drinkable.

Junk food pairing: a light, dry mead like this one will pair well with white meats and mild cheeses so get yourself a box of Chicken in a Bisket crackers and dose them with the American cheese flavored Easy Cheese.