When I was in high school, I ran with a bad crowd. They were promiscuous. They drank heavily. And they all carried knives.
They also carried swords, longbows, and maces. And dressed in chainmail and hose. And answered to names like “Thorgrim” or “Cariadoc”. Yes, when I was in high school, I fell into a historical recreation club known as the Society for Creative Anachronism. They are a cross between Civil War re-enactors and the enthusiastic line-up outside a Lord of the Rings premiere.
It sounds nerdy, but it seemed pretty rational when I was 16. I befriended slacker university students. I took up archery. I spent my weekends in the company of women dressed like comely wenches. And I had as much free liquor as I wanted. All I had to do to fit in was pretend that I had read Beowulf.
The liquor of choice for men named Thorgrim is home-made mead. Whereas beer is made from grains, and wine from grapes, mead is fermented honey. It was all the rage when Harold Longshanks was king of England.
Properly brewed, mead isn’t overly sweet because most of the sugar in the honey is converted into potent alcohol with hints of the wildflowers that originally fed the bees. It is often flavoured with tea, berries, spices or (in one experiment) Jamaican hot peppers. I even tried my hand at making some mead, turning over three bottles of the stuff to my Grade 12 history teacher in lieu of a final paper (he gave me a B and I gave him a hangover).
All this flooded back last week when I spotted a bottle of Moniack Mead in the LCBO ($21.95, Vintages #987263). Mead is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. In fact, the Government of Canada published a report exploring the possibility of creating a global demand for Canadian mead by piggybacking on the success of our icewine industry. Go team.
I highly recommend the Moniack Mead as the best (and only) commercial mead I can find right now in Ontario. It is a lovely amber colour, with a summery nose of clover and spice. On the palate, it has an unctuous mouth-feel, but it’s no sweeter than a glass of port. I drank it chilled before dinner, and it reminded me of amontillado in that it is both rich and refreshing. Flavours of marmalade, butterscotch and baked apple are well-integrated and linger into a long finish. Moniak was fine before a meal, but I’m saving my second bottle to serve with some cheese the next time a warband of vikings show up at my door and need a digestif.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca