(plus 2 era-appropriate desserts to go with it)
Chaucer's Mead new 2010 label. Diehard homebrewers aren't as enthusiastic as Wine Enthusiast, but most of them seem young and clearly weren't expecting a dessert wine.
A couple of years ago my husband was rooting around our dwindling wine rack selection on a Halloween eve, right before the trick-or-treat crowd came by. It was actually starting to get genuinely chilly outside in the evenings…
“Hey, Deb–what is this stuff? Chaucer’s Mead?!” [squints at label] “Says you’re supposed to serve it fresh. How old is it?”
“I dunno. Last year? I forgot it was there.”
“Are you sure it’s still good?”
I started typing away to find out. “One of the Renaissance Faire bloggers says it’s really gross fresh and you’re supposed to let it age, but it looks like they mean the kind you make at home.”
Clearly neither of us was an expert.
Mead, of course, is a drink made by fermenting honey. I’d been vaguely aware of it ever since I was eight or nine years old and my dad handed me a copy of Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. (Quick, everybody, picture Errol Flynn or Kevin Costner, your preference, dressed up more or less as Kermit the Frog in a pointy hat and feather, leaping up onto a dead log with arms akimbo to shout “Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!” at his fellows in a gratingly cheerful tone…)
I like reading about medieval and renaissance Europe, but I’ve never favored the Renaissance Faire approach–especially because you have to sew your own costume AND know all the names of the pieces AND how to lace them all together. A lot of participants get very snotty about each other’s authenticity. Which is fun, clearly, but I’d be the one they were getting snotty with. Also I’ve never wanted to be addressed as “wench” unless I had a huge frying pan handy to teach the knave who tried it some manners.
Also, after seeing my ex-brother-in-law’s home beer brewing setup (very successful, but then he’s English and knows his stout) I always thought that brewing mead at home would also involve big trash cans with burp valves (I mean, gas traps, though on reflection that’s actually no politer), attract a guaranteed parade of ants even in January (this being Pasadena), and that the stuff would come out cloudy and greenish and a little too authentically medieval for enjoyment.
So all in all, it wasn’t until I stumbled on a bottle at the Trader Joe’s while looking for a gift bottle of more conventional port that I ever considered tasting mead. It was enough of a novelty and the price was right–about $10. Then, of course, I put it in the wine rack and forgot about it for an entire year…which, it turns out, is the right thing to do.
Back at the kitchen counter my husband had finished squinting at the fine print, decided it probably wouldn’t kill or blind both of us at the same time, and was already opening the bottle to pour a sip into each of two glasses. It looked and smelled like a white dessert wine–light, clear, not at all the cloudy, beerily fermenting syrup I’d been imagining. So we decided to risk it on the count of three.
Even though it looked fine, I’m not crazy about sweet dessert wines and my husband is, so I was still prepared to wince. But whatever I was expecting, it certainly wasn’t this.
It didn’t taste like honey at all–it tasted like all the flowers the honey had been made from. Somehow the brewing and aging had unlocked all the delicate nectary flavors that had been trapped inside the honey, and the flavor kept changing and shifting with every sip. A sherry glass was plenty–it was a bit rich, another surprise, because sherry hovers around 18% alcohol, and this mead was only 10%. But it was intense and fascinating.
Just then, of course, my husband spotted the little packet of spices, like a teabag, that had been hanging around the neck of the bottle and decided he really ought to mull some of the mead with them. In five minutes, the whole downstairs smelled of nutmeg. It was too cloying for me, but he liked it. (Chorus: because he’s a boy) See, though, you can get away with that for a $10 bottle, and your wife doesn’t have to get mad at you. And there was enough left to have a little unsullied mead over the next couple of days.
What to serve with it, though? I want to keep the contrast between the mead and the food, which is going to have to be either an appetizer or a Continue reading
Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Odd food, Revised recipes, shopping, wine | Tagged: Chaucer's Mead, dessert wines, flan, gingerbread, honey, mead, medieval foods, microwave cooking, Renaissance Faire, Trader Joe's | Comments Off on Getting Mead-ieval
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