Once thought fit only for medieval tankards or Viking drinking horns, this ancient honey wine is being revived and refined by local makers such as Louis Costa.
Louis Costa grew up in a village in Bordeaux surrounded by vineyards. Like generations of his family before him, he became a winemaker, working in the local chateaux before travelling the world.
Arriving in Australia, he made wine at Vasse Felix in Margaret River before settling in Byron Bay, northern NSW.
Wine grapes don’t grow well in this warm, damp part of the world, so Costa turned his passion for winemaking into a new career, finding a job at local brewery Stone & Wood. He couldn’t shake the winemaking bug, though, so he started experimenting with another source of fermentable sugar that also happens to be abundant in Byron: honey.
“My grandfather in France was a keen apiarist,” says Costa. “When I was growing up I remember him making beautiful, pure varietal honey. So, in Byron I decided to start making honey wine – mead."Honey wine in France has a really bad reputation. It is very sweet, with a coarse flavour. I wanted to create something that is different: clean and more refined, less sweet and heavy, more refreshing.”
Over the past five years, Costa has made countless small trial batches of mead, fermenting honey from single orchards and single flower types and adding local fruits and native botanicals to make still mead and sparkling mead, dry mead and sweet mead.
Now he’s on the cusp of launching the first commercial bottlings under his Aurum brand with locally grown ingredients – a dry mead made from macadamia honey, and an off-dry sparkling rosé mead infused with hibiscus flowers and strawberry gum.
“Rosé wine is very popular at the moment,” says Costa. “Especially rosé from Provence. I wanted to produce a rosé for the Byron Bay lifestyle, using the flavours of where we are.”
Louis Costa is one of a growing number of new Australian mead makers invigorating an almost forgotten drinks category. For many years, pretty much the only maker of mead in this country (apart from a handful of very smaller regional producers and a few keen home brewers) was Maxwell in McLaren Vale, and mead consumers were dismissed as people who liked to dress up as Vikings, or indulged in medieval role play and drank honey wine from tankards.
Mead heads
Now, there’s a surge of interest in this ancient drink, with a new wave of producers looking for more diverse markets and adventurous brewers such as Two Metre Tall in Tasmania delving into the world of mead-making.
Stone Dog Neadery near Goulburn, NSW has gained an enviable reputation for its range of meads since it opened in 2015, with mead maker Steve Kirby in demand as a judge at the growing number of local wine and brewing shows now exhibiting meads.
Sydney wine retailer and producer Brendan Hilferty from Sparrow & Vine makes his Project B mead using urban honey sourced from Newtown. And Sunshack Cider in the Southern Highlands of NSW now also produce a range of sparkling products under the Bee Mead label, bottled in 500ml bottles aimed at the craft beer consumer.Another new NSW producer, Sunlight Liquor, has a range of meads that is also aimed at the craft beer and cider markets: the two products currently in the range are available in cans, have bold, exaggerated flavours, and are infused with the kind of botanicals you’d find in a gin, vermouth or sour ale.
In an extraordinary coincidence, the Sunlight Liquor's Gums and Roses is, like Aurum’s sparkling pink mead, infused with hibiscus and strawberry gum – albeit in a much punchier, less subtle way.
Rather than appealing to the craft beer consumer, though, Louis Costa sees his Aurum meads sitting on dining tables next to fine wine.
“I can see them working really well as part of a degustation of food made from native ingredients,” he says. “After all, they're made with wholly native ingredients; we didn’t have to cut down any forests to plant a vineyard. That’s where the added value to this product is: to have it next to the new beautiful Australian gastronomy.”
https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/food-and-wine/wine-and-spirits/mead-in-australia-a-long-forgotten-drink-makes-a-comeback-20190411-p51d8j
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