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There is a lot that we admire about the wine world.
This so not to say that we do not admire the beer world deeply, or that we do not drink a lot of great beer. We do, and we do. Winemakers have a saying that beer is what you drink while you’re making wine. They are not wrong. The blog post about brewers is coming.
There is so much to be said, though, for what the wine world has to do to make a genuinely phenomenal wine. Two of the badges of honor in wine are the terms “Old Vines,” or in French, “Vielles Vignes,” and “Estate Bottled,” or “Mis en bouteille au Château.” That last one means, “we grew the grapes, we made the wine, and we bottled it on site.”
The set of steps that need to be completed to make a great wine that sports those designations is incredible. You have to buy or lease, and then prep a piece of land, and plant grape vines. (Or you could buy an old vines vineyard. That’s not “little”.) You have to plant varieties that will produce the best possible quality in your location, soil type and climate. After you’ve done that, and before you get any money from your vineyard, you have to build a winery. You need barrels, tanks, bottling equipment. Jump through all the government hoops. Own or lease storage for the wine for the two or three (or five or six) years before it will be released. You generally need an international distribution system.
Most critically, you have to possess mastery of two distinct and very different skill sets (using the modern business jargon that I despise so much). Someone at the winery has to know how to grow grapes really well. Beyond planting, he or she has to know pruning, and canopy and pest management. They have to know the plants’ nutrient demands, know ground cover and tilling management, how to plan and execute vine support, how to determine ripeness, and finally how to execute a harvest. That’s the Readers Digest version. It’s actually a lot more complicated.
The other requisite domain of mastery (there now, isn’t that better?) is how to make the wine. The adage about how you learn ten different ways to make wine is to ask nine winemakers. All of them may work. But there are many steps, many critical decisions to be made, and tons of manual labor (yeah, yeah, “literally tons,” but many, many vocations can use that joke). It is both highly skilled and grunt work at the same time. At small wineries, the same person can be the one responsible for both of these immense domains of mastery.
This making–the-stuff part, the brewers have, too, but the challenge of having a whole year’s worth of your product on the line with every step is not something they have to consider. Even if you screw up a rare, barrel-aged something or other beer in February, you can start another batch next week. Getting where you need to be to make that beer doesn’t take 30 or 50 years. When you’re making wine, there’s a lot on the line.
Wine requires a whole different level of commitment. It is why families are so important in the wine world. Those kinds of time scales mandate dedication and bonds that are hard to break. They reveal the kind of patience, respect, compassion and flat-out endurance that is most likely to be marshaled by mothers and fathers toward their children, and the other way around. When you are living through the kinds and levels of stress that running a business puts on those relationships, it is really clear how much those families have given to their wineries, and for how long, so we can enjoy their wine, and make our lives a little better. To me, that is really admirable.
At this point, craft beer is in its second generation. There is a whole slew of twenty-somethings out there who learned about stouts and IPAs and weizens from their Moms and Dads. They learned that all-malt beers are just better, and that Weihenstephan is going to turn 1000 years old in their lifetime. They are the second generation of informed beer drinkers.
Most importantly, though, they learned about beer diversity, and they learned to educate and challenge and please their palates. They learned that drinking the same beer, day in and day out, is denying yourself a nearly limitless variety of pleasures that smart, dedicated and hardworking brewers are crafting with the sweat of their brows and the depths of their creativity. They expect “genuinely delicious” in all of the things they drink.
I have said for the past five years or so that mead is about where craft beer was in the late 80’s. We may actually be where craft beer was in the early 1990s at this point. It’s fascinating that the craft beer revolution followed on the heels of the California fine wine revolution, but didn’t really talk all that much about it. California wine makers fought and won their own battle with an uninformed American - and eventually international – wine-buying public. It may shock craft beer to hear it, but craft beer is where California wine was in the early 1980s, as well.
For us meadsters, we have a lot ahead of us, but we’re no longer on square one. There are recognizable names in the industry, and some very large and reputable media outlets have paid some serious attention to mead since I started saying that. We are now on the radar at UC Davis; there are both beginner and advanced classes being offered there to aspiring amateur and professional mead makers. There is recognition from the supply side that mead makers use a lot of honey, bottles, capsules and labels. We have an industry association that has survived a leadership transition. We’ve grown up a good bit.
The next step will come as the first generation of mead lovers brings the “normal” of mead to their now-becoming-adult children. The “normal” being the comfortable, expected standard that mead goes with dinner, or dessert, or that splitting a bottle of mead over a game of Monopoly or Catan or Cribbage makes the whole experience glow just a little brighter. The normal that says when we’re having RE BBQ brisket, we want a Schramm’s Blackberry, because that’s what sets everything off best. The normal that in the fridge – maybe downstairs in the “beer fridge” - there are some IPAs, maybe a chardonnay or a bottle of L. Mawby, and a mead or two.
We still have work to do. There are still people who eat sushi and don’t even know it’s missing the Ginger mead. And there are Detroit area restaurants whose servers don’t recommend, or even serve, the Statement with their flourless chocolate torte. There are still people whose parents didn’t teach them about good mead yet. But as with craft beer, things that taste great win in the end.
Mead is coming of age in the US. Meadmakers will face some very challenging questions as our star rises in the beverage alcohol market. Mead needs to get registered in the consciousness of the public with a positive image. As the mead industry grows and prospers, meads are establishing their own values.
Value in the wine and beer worlds (as it is elsewhere among certain products) is based on offerings being possessed of both great scarcity and great quality. In wine, that scarcity issues forth from geographic limitations on production. Small regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux in France, and like the Napa Valley in California, are capable of producing spectacular wine, and can only produce so much of it. As a result, the finest examples command top prices, and are carefully allocated commodities. The top examples of Grand Cru Burgundy from Vosne Romanée fetch many hundreds of dollars a bottle - in the instance of the finest estates, many thousands of dollars a bottle. In fact, all of the wines listed in the current “World’s Top 50 Most Expensive Wines” list from Wine Searcher come in at more than $1000/bottle.
There is a natural value to mead that has not been well explained to the public, and which the mead world has not capitalized upon. There are commercial meadmakers in the world today capable of creating mead of spectacular quality. The demand for their products is also exceeding the supply, which in-and-of-itself creates a condition of scarcity. But the true scarcity that has not been exposed as of 2015 is that the raw materials of spectacular mead are themselves subject to considerable scarcity, and it is a scarcity that cannot be overcome with any simple measures.
The core of any great mead is spectacular honey, and spectacular honey is a scarce commodity for several reasons. First and foremost, honey is itself one of the most difficult and labor-intensive foods to produce. Honey is the only fermentable sugar that is derived from an animal source. I have said for years that honey is precious exactly because its production is dependent on a symbiotic relationship between colonies of bees, the plants they forage upon to collect the nectar and pollen they need, and the human beekeepers that nurture those colonies of bees, and reap the surplus honey that the bees produce. Locations notwithstanding, if you want more grapes or malt, you can plant more vines or barley, but if you want more honey, you can’t simply plant more beehives.
There is no step in beekeeping and honey harvesting that can be done in any fashion other than manually. True, of late the there is the FlowTM Hive, a contraption which claims to simplify the harvesting of honey, but that is but one step in the craft of beekeeping. The leading beekeepers I know are openly skeptical about its usefulness, and none of the pollinating beekeepers responsible for the production of many of the world’s finest varietal honeys have signed on to replace their Langstroth hives with the device.
Secondly, the places and blooms in the world that produce our finest honeys are not infinite, nor are they present in quantities that are in any way determined by the amount of honey we want them to be capable of producing. Orange growers do not plant more orange trees because the world wants more Orange Blossom honey. The quantities of Orange Blossom honey, lavender and heather honey available are dictated by the size and health of those crops. Even more scarce and challenging are honey varieties like Tupelo, Sourwood and Tasmanian Leatherwood, which beekeepers move their bees to solely for the honey, and which generate no pollination revenue for them at all.
Finally, great quality honey is the product of great beekeeping. It may come as news to the honey consuming public, but not all beekeepers elect to maintain their hives and harvest their honey with the care and diligence required to deliver up the cream of the crop of honey quality. The same can be said for the other ingredients in the finest meads in the world: the fruits and spices that give many of our best meads their unique and compelling flavors and aromas. Real fruits, of the finest varieties, picked at perfect ripeness, are not easy to come by. World-class honey, fruits and spices are inherently scarce.
In short, you’re not going to trip over the stuff of great meads just walking out your front door. If we’re going to keep up with the great wine producers in the world who set the bar for quality, we’re going to have to use real fruit, great fruit, spectacular honey, and lots of time and care. Our job is to help customers understand how we are creating the value of our mead.
We are into the portion of the year when cherries take on monumental importance. My family has regularly accused me of being a slave to my orchard. I readily admit that there are times of the year when the care and picking of the fruit trees takes priority over fishing and trips to Traverse City.
It is a bit restrictive. I have a different view of this partnership, however. The trees, raspberries, currants and I have a mutually beneficial relationship. To me, it seems like it has helped the Schaarbeeks to have an advocate grafting them to new rootstocks and making sure they are pampered. In return, they give me the best cherries I have ever tasted, and in turn, my favorite meads. Others seem to enjoy them, as well. It does not seem one-sided to me that the trees ask me to hang out and pay attention to them for a few weeks a year. It is a drag that those weeks coincide with the Hex hatch, and can overlap the National Homebrewers Conference. The Hex hatch and the NHC give it up, for sure, but in a manner that is ephemeral. Those trees give me gifts that I get to lay down, and share with my friends, and that help us make clear to the world how good mead can be.
The Heart of Darkness and The Statement Reserve, though, are equally beholden to nature. The release of the HoD is limited by what the trees and Mother Nature give to us. In some years, there are many cherries, and there are both the HoD and the Reserve. In some years, there is neither. In 2010, the year between the batches that I made for B. Nektar, there was not enough fruit for a release. There was nothing I could do about that.
This year is already tense. A couple of weeks before this post, the trees got a frost that may have destroyed some of the fruit buds, and we will not know until fruit set how much damage was done. If it was as dire as head pessimist Ken Schramm decried, it may compromise a large percentage of the fruit. If the blossoms were not as developed (and vulnerable) as they seemed, we may have a smaller than usual - but still respectable - crop. Fingers are crossed.
This is a challenge to us, because we have a following of supporters who look forward to each release of the Heart of Darkness. So do I, and my wife and daughters and mom and brothers and sister and nieces and in-laws. But we can only make as much as Big Momma N lets us, and that seems to mean that folks don’t get as much as they would like. Lots of people get none at all. We can't guarantee that everyone will get a bottle, not even family and Mazer Club members. It’s a tough call. Ruthless business people would tell us to raise the price until the number of people who want a bottle and the number who can afford one level out. I don’t want to do that.
We’re working on getting more cherries into production. We’ve increased the raspberry and currant plantings, and we are investigating working with some of our extended family on planting more cherry trees at a new orchard site. Maybe we’ll have to purchase some acreage of our own. We’re not taking this lying down. But as I have said many times, we’re talking about fruit trees here. This stuff doesn’t happen in a weekend. We are beholden to nature.
Beyond the descriptions of flavors and aromas, and subjective views on whether the wine is actually enjoyable or not, many of the wine tasting notes I read include a final note as to whether or not you should drink or hold the wine. "Drink" means that the wine is at or near the prime of its aging curve, and "hold" means that it still has at least a year or more to reach its potential. Actually, I have seen one more descriptor – drink up – which means that the wine may have passed its peak, and needs to be consumed now before it goes too far down the other side of the hill.
Some wines get both a “drink” and a “hold.” They are delicious now, but have potential to continue improving. These are wines you can be glad you bought by the six-pack or case. In general, though, wine and mead cellaring is a lot like growing fruit trees; it doesn’t just teach you patience, it beats it into you with a rock.
A recent vertical tasting of the three batches of Black Agnes put this all in perspective. The result of age was immediately apparent just in the aromatics of the meads. Batch One was much more rounded and soft; its fruit was cleaner and clearer, and it presented layers of fruit character that were easy to tease apart. Batch Two was slightly more angular, still appealing, but not as giving in its fruit component depth. Batch Three was even more “stern,” with fruity but youthful aromatics. It was definitely the teenager in this comparison, which was remarkable, because when I tasted and nosed a barrel sample in isolation at the meadery just a week earlier, I thought, “Man, this is terrific.” It was especially apparent when I had nosed and tasted what it could become with time, Batch Three was definitely a drink/hold.
I’ve never seen a drink /hold comment in a mead review. It’s kind of a shame, as meads are definitely more wine-like than beer-like, and frequently do not show their true splendor until a minimum of two to sometimes five or more years from bottling. At Schramm’s, we put some information on anticipated maturities on our labels. We hope that helps you to understand when your mead may be capable of delivering its finest performance.
