Mead Makers Market Mystic Mixture

It’s tough to market mead, an ancient beverage made from honey, when modern rules prevent brewers from touting its qualities as an aphrodisiac.

So mead makers promote the honey wine’s exotic, fragrant bouquet; its healthful qualities; and its place in 8,000 years of history.

Mead, a lightly flavored wine that has been around since ancient times, is making a comeback of sorts after being overshadowed by its grape-based relatives for years, mead brewers say. They market their beverage as a light, natural after-dinner drink with the healthy properties of honey.

French native Bernard Blachere and his wife Diane Rice opened L’Abeille Honey Winery last autumn in Stowe and hope to produce 10,000 bottles of mead this year.

For Blachere, who learned about mead making from a friend’s grandfather as he was growing up in Cassis, near Marseilles, the attraction of the business is practical.

“I like its digestibility,” he said on a tour of his winery one recent snowy day. Blachere said he had first been attracted to beekeeping, and then slowly learned about mead making as “the best by-product of the apiary.”

Mead’s appeal, practical or otherwise, appears to be catching on slowly. Blachere said he was one of the founders of the Colorado-based American Mead Association, which claims to have members in 14 countries.

Mead brewers like to evoke their beverage’s long and storied history. The honey wine appears in accounts of King Arthur’s deeds; historians say it was highly popular in Europe until the Middle Ages were drawing to a close.

Mead drinkers long believed that the wine had aphrodisiac qualities, but producers are barred by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from making that claim about their products.