Today I bottled 2.1 gallons of the mead that had sat, patiently winking at me under the fluorescent tube lights by the washing machine, since last August. If that seems like a long time, winemaking may frustrate you.
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| Pictured: Not pee, I promise. |
Look at it in contrast to beer. If you do it right, making beer is a quaint afternoon of minding a propane burner as it simmers and bubbles away grain starches like a thermochemical sculptor, leaving you with the sweet, sugary must (must, n.: beer before it's beered). Left with a week or two in the cool and dark, a packet of yeast will whip it into shape, presumably running some kind of micro-organic Rocky IV training montage until that syrupy sugar water emerges from the basement corner a craggy ale, a smooth lager, or a feisty farmhouse, ready to go twelve rounds with your clarity of thought and sense of equilibrium.
Wines, though. Fucking wines. Wines will ferment more or less as quickly as a beer. The difference is if you drink the wine in those same two weeks that you do the beer, you'll wonder from which organ came the raunchy swill you just swallowed. The liver, or perhaps the spleen?
That's because wine takes its time to grow. It yawns, stretches out, breathes a little. For a month or six you'd do well to let it sit, settle out, allow the suspended sediment to sink like little stones to the bottom. Then, doing your best impression of a cardiothoracic surgeon, you so very gently slip a siphon into the surface and drain it away into a new, sanitized vessel without disturbing the silty bottom. Then do that a few more times, and inside of a year later, you're ready to distribute it into bottles.
What does wine have to do with mead, you ask? Isn't mead basically Viking bourbon, distilled from dragon's blood or the tears of coastal French peasants or something?
To the surprise of many, mead is just wine, but instead of squishing grapes, the vintner (vintner, n.: one who brews wine but is too cool to call it brewing) combines honey, water, and whatever else their heart desires to make the must. It's great, really. It demands less labor as honey is pre-squished by nature. Local apiaries--bee farms--abound, and supporting them means supporting a vital and threatened pillar of our food system as we know it.
And the drink itself...oh, my friends, pop the cork and breathe deep the musk of life. Mead offers a world of variety: crisp, airy, enigmatic, evocative of a dry white wine but with a floral lilt that rewards those who collect dust on the bottle. A sip of good mead is the sound of a boot atop a crunchy leaf, the crunch of the first tortilla chip out of the bag, the resonant thunderclap of a perfect high-five. It is--and this is neither hyperbole nor, frankly, metaphor--the bee's knees. Or maybe its feet. You've probably noticed that I have a glut of dubious hobbies but bee anatomy is not (yet) one of them.
Many moons ago I worked 11.5 pounds of Fruitwood Orchards' delicious wildflower honey into fourish gallons of must and pitched into its amber depths a French yeast. Today I bottled half of it and racked (rack, v.: to siphon your must into another container and pray to the gods of asepsis that you sanitized it well) the other half into another container over half an ounce of dried orange peels, which is a common enough additive for beer (particularly hefeweizens and other Teutonic shenanigans) but relatively novel for this sort of thing. Which brings us back to the amateurish bent to this pursuit. I have no idea how this will work, but maybe I'll stumble on to something very cool and very delicious.
I plan to crack one of the bottles on New Year's Eve and the next one once the letters "RN" follow my name. In the meantime, there they lay, supine on the shelf in my basement, and every mote of dust that lands on their deep green shells teases of another subtle kiss on the tongue, hundreds of sunrises from now.
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| Look at those fickle bastards. |
Reading: Civilized to Death by Chris Ryan
Listening to: The Humbling River by Puscifer
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