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.