Pleased to mead you-Painted Rocks Winery reintroduces the world’s oldest tipple

Drinking alcohol is one of mankind’s oldest hobbies. Somebody somewhere, stumbling around looking for kicks in the mists of prehistory, discovered that drinking certain kinds of water made you feel funny, but funny in a good way. Long before grapes and grain, the liquid that left our hypothetical early human wondering if that was really him last night chucking spears at the moon with his atlatl was almost certainly the result of someone accidentally leaving honey out in the rain until it went bad, but bad in a good way.

by Andy Smetanka Missoula Independent

Mead is mankind’s oldest alcoholic beverage. Like so many other happy accidents that have conspired to advance culture and civilization, its manufacture has been perfected from serendipitous beginnings into something approaching an art form—albeit an art form that has been largely ignored for over two centuries. Though it enjoys only the tiniest slice of a market share dominated by its close relative wine, or beer, mead is slowly making a comeback after centuries of neglect, changing tastes, and a diversion from mainstream consumption steered by economic factors.

Even in Montana. While not historically in on the ground floor, mead-wise (nobody’s fault, there), the state might just be poised to gain a modest reputation as home to a new mead revival. More people are rediscovering the joys of honey wine, and one small business in a tucked-away corner of the Bitterroot Valley is slaking their thirsts with several different varieties of an ancient beverage crafted with modern skill. After only a year and a half, mead from the Painted Rocks Winery http://paintedrocks-winery.com/ has found its way into 80 retail outlets across the state. The alcoholic beverage with the longest past seems to have a future in Montana, and for Painted Rocks Winery, that future looks pretty good.

Good neighbors are good business
Ken Schultz made his first batch of mead in 1989. Before that, he was a hobby winemaker who started out in the mid-’70s experimenting with native grape varietals that grew around the Great Lakes region. Shortly before leaving his adopted state of Montana for New Guinea, where he and his wife Lisa spent seven years setting up vocational programs, he liberated a five-gallon bucket of sugared honey that someone was about to throw away and tried to figure out something to do with it.

“I got them to give it to me,” Schultz says, “and I decided to make mead out of it. I bottled it the day before we left for the airport and didn’t get to taste it until we came back on furlough in 1994. And it was good. When we came back here to stay in ’97, it was great.”

Here is Alta, Mont., thirty miles up the West Fork Road south of Darby, home of the first ranger station in the United States and a former gold-mining settlement dating from the late 1800s. Six-hundred people, mostly miners and their families, lived near the confluence of two creeks in 1891. A hundred years later, only 26 families live in Alta year-round. The post office closed in 1940. The state keeps the town on the map, but mostly just as a landmark.

Everyone in Alta seems to wear at least three hats. Schultz owns a masonry company in the valley with six full-time employees. His partner Alan Tresemer, half of one of the four married couples who hold joint ownership of the winery, is also the chief of the fire department, headquartered just across the creek in his backyard. Returning to Alta after a seven-year absence, says Schultz, also meant he and Lisa got to know a new group of neighbors, since most of the old ones had moved away.

“In ’89 there was a whole different set of people up here,” he remembers, “and when we came back there was nobody that was the same as when we left. Nobody who lived up here before really wanted to be social. Everybody was here because the world was going to end or something, and everybody was feuding over whose tree was whose and whose water was whose. But the people up here now are different. They’re more into socializing and potlucks, so more occasions to bring wine and give wine. Gosh, my wine cellar just depleted.”

The mead that had been aging while they were away proved useful for getting to know the neighbors, Schultz recalls—at least what little was left of it. Those five gallons of honey made only about fifteen gallons of mead, and to judge from how many of those weren’t waiting for him when he came back after seven years away, Schultz reckons he wasn’t the only one who thought it tasted great.

“I half suspect that my father-in-law drank most of what we left behind while we were in New Guinea,” he says with a petulant chuckle. “I remember making a lot more than what we found when we got back.”

Meading of the minds
Schultz’s new neighbor Alan Tresemer also loved the mead. “It was exceptionally good,” Schultz recalls wistfully. “Maybe it was beginner’s luck, but Alan and I started talking about there being something to it. Living as far as we do from town, everybody’s dream up here is to have a business where you can stay here. It looked like this might possibly be it, so we started looking into it and it seemed doable.”

“Plus,” he grins, “in the history of this place up here, there always was a little bit of hooch being made, so we figured we would be filling a historical void.”

Today, Tresemer acts as the marketing and business whiz of the winemaking operation, and Schultz is the head winemaker. Four married couples hold joint ownership of Painted Rocks Winery, which officially opened for business on Jan. 1, 2002, and over the past year and a half an efficient delegation of labor and responsibilities has evolved between the four active partners involved in daily operations and four inactive partners. Alan Tresemer’s wife, Erica, runs most of the day-to-day operations, with Alan developing the marketing and handling sales. Erica is also the winery’s vendor contact. Lisa Schultz, according to company literature, “keeps all of us fed on bottling day and makes sure the winery is always clean and orderly.” The two other couples handle distribution, stocking of supplies and some bookkeeping, and all eight partners help out with the bottling detail and collectively shoulder the burden of quality control, which means sampling every batch.

All live basically within sight of each other. And except for storage, the sum total of Painted Rocks’ operation—tasting room, offices and the meadery itself—fits compactly in an area the size of a modest living room in an outbuilding on Tresemer’s property, buttressed on one side by a plant-filled sunroom with sloping greenhouse windows.

It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing—the intermittent closure of the West Fork Road due to ongoing road repair has put a bite on walk-in business—but sales have grown steadily with occasional spikes. The hardest part of being in the mead business, both Schultz and Tresemer agree, has been reacquainting potential customers with a beverage that has fallen from both popularity and common parlance over the past few centuries. Prior to the introduction of sugar from the West Indies, honey was the world’s most popular sweetener and mead its bewitching handmaiden. With the refinement of sugar from beets in the 1800s by French scientists (who, Schultz explains, were charged by Napoleon with the task of finding a domestic substitute for cane sugar supplies cut off by a Spanish blockade in the Caribbean), honey’s fortunes entered into a period of steady decline.

With it went mead. You’d be amazed, say Schultz and Tresemer, how many people don’t know the first thing about mead. Even among people who know a thing or two about wine, mead remains a curiosity, quaint and somehow obsolete.

“We’ll get people walking by our display at a tasting,” Schultz grimaces, “and they’ll just look over and you can tell from this look on their face that they’re thinking, ‘Oh, cute! They’re trying to make wine in Montana!’”

Those who actually give it a taste, says Alan, can often be fooled into thinking it’s something else simply because they have no idea what they’re actually tasting.

“A lot of people come up to our table at tastings and say ‘I want a Chardonnay.’ If they haven’t heard our story and don’t know it’s honey wine, we can give them a glass of the light mead and they’ll say, ‘That’s fine! Thanks.’”

So far, though, the partners have encountered wine snobbery only on a very small scale. More people, says Tresemer, find their discovery of honey wine to be an exciting and liberating one—once he and Schultz tell them what they’re drinking, anyway.

“The neat thing about mead is that it’s a non-snob wine,” Tresemer says. “You can drink it because you enjoy its different flavors, and you don’t have to be looking for things that are considered in wine culture to be very important. You can drink it because you like it.”

And a growing number of wine drinkers do, many of them entering the winery out of mild curiosity and coming out as born-again mead drinkers. Even Tresemer admits to being surprised to learn that walk-in business accounts for seven percent of total sales—not bad for a business removed from Western Montana’s second-biggest tourist artery by thirty miles of perennially torn-up road. In any event, says Schultz, the winery’s public profile will get a timely boost when a tasting room opens in Darby later this month. It’s part of the business package allowed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Schultz says, and the partners are clearly looking forward to it. Reflecting on what they’ve accomplished so far, they’re also pleased with their progress.

“In a year’s time,” says Schultz, “we went from just being eight people living here above the dam to having our product in eighty stores statewide. It’s a combination of mead being an alternative to all the Californian wines in the supermarket, plus it’s Montanan. It’s our own. It’s made here. And people get into that. Isn’t this where everyone wishes they could live?”

The Viking you can’t help liking

With the discovery of mead, says Schultz, often comes an interest in the lore and legend behind the drink. It’s certainly something that Schultz himself has been immersed in since making his first batch.

“It happens,” he shrugs. “When you start making mead, the lore just shows up.”

The winery’s labeling and literature strategy, in fact, caters to people who fancy a bit of intrigue in their bottle, invoking a good bit of lusty adventure with reference to “real men in furry clothing with wild, luxurious beards, traveling in wooden ships on uncharted seas” and “serving wenches instead of waitresses and impromptu ‘picnics’ that involve sun, good food and a fair bit of naughtiness.”

A lot of people, if they know anything about mead at all, associate it first with Vikings, and perhaps for this reason the winery’s most effective attempt at branding is the Norseman whose mischievous eyes and cockeyed grin grace the bottle of the company’s top-selling Dark Mead. Sad to say, the Viking doesn’t actually work at the winery. He’s an artist’s model Alan tracked back to the artist after seeing his likeness first as a dwarf in a video game. The video game company owned the rights to the dwarf, explains Alan, but the artist agreed to let Painted Rocks have a customized computer “morph” of the bearded model for use on its Dark Mead bottle. It is unclear whether the model himself—a Toronto machinist—is aware of his exciting second life as a branding tool in Montana.

Vikings weren’t the only bunch who did most of their carousing with mead. Evidence of mead consumption (and enjoyment) has been found in nearly every ancient culture that historians, anthropologists and archaeologists have stuck their noses into. The ancient Greeks drank it, as did the Romans, the Egyptians, Ethiopians, Aztecs and Incas—both for ceremonial and recreational purposes. The mystical ley-lines connecting mead across far-flung pre-Christian cultures in Europe are illuminated by the fact that the word for mead is similar in most European languages, all stemming from a common Sanskrit origin. Mead even makes a poetic appearance in the earliest surviving specimen of English literature, Beowulf, an epic poem recounting the deeds of a sixth-century Scandinavian warrior, much of which takes place in the great mead-hall of Heorot.

Mead-lore, though hardly the kind of thing modern descendents of the Vikings walk around singing, is still woven into the folklore of Scandinavia. According to legend, the patron saint of Sweden, Birgitta, once turned a vat of water into mead after running out of drink to serve a visiting king. The English term “honeymoon” comes from the practice of encouraging young couples to drink mead for thirty days (i.e. a moon) after their nuptials to promote fertility and ensure male children—a belief held dear by the Vikings, but at least as old as the ancient Babylonians. There might be a scientific basis to this cherished belief, too, as drinking the mildly acidic beverage regularly over the course of a month could alter the body’s pH enough to be a factor in determining the sex of the fetus. Then again, the fact that Vikings managed to field, over the course of several hundred years, a team capable of raiding and subsequently settling much of northern Europe suggests that drinking mead to make boy babies worked only about half the time. There must have been some girl babies in there somewhere.

“They didn’t take a lot of baths in those days, either,” quips Schultz. “If they were going to have to get close enough to have children, the mead probably helped. That’s my theory.”

The origin of the honeymoon isn’t the only bit of lore connecting mead and the moon, either. In Norse mythology, mead was stolen from the gods by a mortal with a prodigious thirst for the stuff named Svigdur, who kept his booty in a mountain spring that burbled forth with it. One night the god Odin, still smarting over the loss of his mead to Svigdur, waylaid Svigdur’s children on a mead-fetching errand. Odin took his mead back and sent the children to the moon in a chariot laden with all the things he thought were wasted or pointless to keep on Earth: Svigdur’s children for their kindness, squandered wealth, missed opportunities, broken vows, yokes for fleas and cages for gnats.

Not that Odin had any right to get all self-righteous on Svigdur in the first place. He himself had stolen mead from a race of dwarves when he and the other gods couldn’t figure out how to make it. Flying into their cave in the shape of an eagle, Odin drank up all the mead and later spit it back out into barrels. But gods seldom feel obliged to qualify their actions.

In cultivating the mead mystique to promote their product, the Painted Rocks partners have also occasionally misjudged the forbearance of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in letting them apply labels alluding to the drink’s wild and woolly history. An early label design that included part of a Beowulf-era riddle to which mead was the answer was rejected by the BATF on the grounds that it boasted of mead’s intoxicating qualities. Which begs the question of why there’s a wine called Smoking Loon on the market when it would seem to promote tobacco use—but then, the BATF doesn’t always feel obliged to justify its actions, either.

Another early label that fell afoul of the BATF—which dictates everything from the size of the mandatory health warning on the label to the permissibility of certain words—was rejected simply because it included the word “light” to promote the winery’s flagship light honey mead. As opposed to the dark honey mead with the Viking on it. The “dark” was fine, says Schultz, but the BATF wanted to know what the caloric content was that made the light honey mead “light.”

“No matter what a label says,” Schultz sighs, “somebody out there is going to buy it and think it says something else. And they’re going to sue somebody. We just changed the name to Pure Honey Mead. The BATF is supposed to be reigning [those kinds of legal actions] in. They way they go about it is kind of funny, but stuff like that happens.”

Honey, I’m home

To ferment an elixir coveted by gods and dwarves, Babylonians and Vikings, you need to start with equally remarkable raw materials. Honey is magical stuff, not least because it requires such a group effort to produce. The average worker honeybee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its six-week lifetime. A bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers on each nectar-gathering trip, and it takes the nectar of about two million flowers to make a pound of honey.

The finished product is a complicated and unstable union of fermentable sugars, enzymes, acids, proteins, trace amounts of minerals and other solids with characteristics of aroma, flavor and color that vary marvelously from place to place depending on the bees’ preferred source of nectar. Some honeys are dark and cloudy, others are light, and the spectrum of color ranges from limpid yellow to pink to green to black. Dark honeys tend to be—though aren’t always—stronger in flavor and aroma than lighter varieties, partly because they have greater concentrations of trace elements like potassium, sulfur, sodium, iron, manganese and magnesium. Persimmon honey is the darkest honey Ken Schultz has ever seen; rich brown buckwheat honey among the best he’s ever tasted.

Most of the Painted Rocks Winery’s mead is made from light clover and knapweed honey from local apiaries, although Schultz personally prefers the darker stuff—especially the carmelized taste of honey that has been altered by heating. This so-called “baker’s honey,” Schultz says, darkened by the heating process the beekeeper uses to separate the wax, isn’t the kind that finds its way into kitchen-variety honey-bears. Beekeepers usually feed it back to the bees, but sometimes Schultz can buy it at a reduced price.

“Truth be told,” Schultz confesses, “the first time we ever made dark mead, it was from some sugared honey that I gave to my wife to melt. She put it in a pan on the wood stove and forgot about it. By the time we got to it, it was almost scorched. It was dark. It was black. I brought it to the winery thinking ‘I’m gonna make something the Vikings would like.’ That’s how we ended up with dark mead.”

Honey can keep practically forever due to certain chemical and physical properties that make it inhospitable to the microorganisms that typically cause spoilage in other foods. The same bee enzymes that break nectar down into simpler sugars also create a small amount of gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which inhibit the growth of bacteria, molds and fungi. Concentrated sugars also contribute to honey’s open-ended shelf life, exerting a high osmotic pressure that draws water from microbial bodies and makes it difficult for them to survive.

Some do, however—particularly wild yeasts, which can lie dormant through the reducing process (bees use their mouths to separate droplets of water from the honey, reducing its moisture content to about 18 percent) until something happens to make the honey more hospitable for them. That something is generally the reintroduction of water.

Good times brewing

“That had to be the way it happened,” says Ken Schultz, of human history’s first encounter with mead. “Bees are everywhere. The honey got wet and it fermented.”

The first mead would also have been dark and strongly flavored, as wild honey tends to be. There’s not as much wild honey around anymore, incidentally, because honeybees aren’t quite as everywhere as they were before the invasion of the varroa mite, a southeast Asian invader that destroyed most of the wild hives in Europe and North America in the 1980s.

But that is probably what happened: Mixing water and honey, either accidentally or on purpose to make a sweet drink, would have raised the pH of the honey to a level at which dormant wild yeasts could wake up and do their thing, consuming the fermentable sugars in the solution and creating alcohol as a waste product. Because the pH of honey, which is acidic anyway, drops even lower as it ferments, the first mead probably didn’t have time to get very strong before the pH dropped to a level that killed off the yeast. But it would have been enough to do the trick.

“Honey contains no buffers that would hold the pH steady,” Schultz says. “It’s complicated to explain, but what happens is that when it starts to ferment, the pH falls off again to the point where the fermentation stops.”

The bottom line is, honey resists easy fermentation, and winemaker Schultz spends a lot of time fiddling with pH levels and sugar concentrations. He also seems to delight in every new refractometer and measuring gadget he can get his hands on. The idea, he says, is to perfect an environment in which yeast will thrive and, hopefully, contribute to the ideal balance of alcohol, sweetness and all the other characteristics of good mead. Those wild yeasts, by the way, are too weak to compete with the commercial yeast that Schultz introduces during primary fermentation, and are quickly overpowered.

Traditional mead is very sweet and somewhat bland. Meads from Painted Rocks are more on the dry side, sometimes slightly “back-sweetened” by Schultz once he’s fermented out most of the sugars. They also have a more sophisticated flavor profile, thanks to the timely addition of certain fruit acids and wine tannins, which give the mead tartness and mouthfeel, as well as finishing with oak chips to simulate the mellow woodiness of a cask-aged wine.

A more sophisticated understanding of fermentation than the one grasped by ancient mead-makers has not necessarily led to a more potent 21st century beverage. The Vikings might have preferred their drink as skull-splittingly strong as they could make it, but Painted Rocks meads are not as alcoholic as Schultz could make them if he wanted to. Under optimal pH conditions, yeast working its way through wine or mead “must,” as the unfermented liquor is called, can produce as much as 14 percent alcohol by volume before it begins to die, poisoned by its own waste, and even then the wine can be fortified with added spirits. With mead, stronger doesn’t necessarily mean better.

“It’s hard to enjoy two glasses of wine with a meal if you’re smashed off the first one,” Schultz reasons. “It takes the enjoyment out of a bottle of wine. We find that our mead has a nice flavor balance when the alcohol’s around 12 percent. Which is still a little strong, but not like putting rubbing alcohol in your mouth. Mead drinkers tend to like the mead to be a little robust.”

From primary fermentation to bottling, each new batch of Painted Rocks mead takes about eight weeks to produce, during which time it will pass through three 250-gallon steel tanks and an array of plate filters before finally ending up in bottles that are corked and labeled, their tops dipped in food-grade wax. From time to time, Schultz will also experiment with five-gallon batches, with an eye toward expanding the winery’s product lineup. In addition to the dark and light varieties, Painted Rocks has also released small batches of huckleberry and elderberry mead, as well as a spiced mead called Winter Myst (their second-biggest seller, actually) and a very limited run of dandelion wine that sold out within days of hitting the shelves. This year’s new model: chokecherry.

Technically, adding anything to the basic honey-yeast-water mixture changes the name of the beverage. Spiced mead is called metheglin. Honey wine with fruit is called melomel or mulsum—unless the fruit is apples, in which case it becomes a cyser, or grapes, which makes it a pyment. Mead with grapes and spices is called hippocras. Honey wine with added malt is called a braggot.

With the exception of the Winter Myst, specifically labeled as a metheglin, Schultz and Alan don’t trouble themselves or their customers too much with precise nomenclature. Just plain ol’ mead is good enough, especially with so many people just now discovering—or rediscovering—the simple charms of honey wine. You’ve got to start somewhere.

“It’s a cult, definitely,” says Schultz, admiring the legs on a tasting glass of his huckleberry mead. “We’re just looking for new members.”

Mead me halfway

A recipe for not-your-grandmother’s dandelion mead
“Rumor has it,” Ken Schultz says evenly, eyeing Alan Tresemer over his reading glasses, “dandelions are coming up in the valley.”

Weatherwise, Alta seems to be about a week behind everybody else. The first dandelions started peeking out in the valley several days earlier, and word is just getting back to the Painted Rocks Winery. Dandelions are big news for Schultz and Tresemer, because in short order the partners will have to mobilize as much picking power as they can muster to start gathering blossoms for this year’s run of dandelion wine.

“People would come into the winery and go, ‘Whoa, you make dandelion wine? My grandmother made dandelion wine!’” remembers Schultz. “We heard that from a lot of old-timers, so we thought we ought to try a batch and see what the reaction was. We made 160 gallons—not very much—and got it out into stores between here and Kalispell, and it was gone so fast that we didn’t even have any for ourselves. It turns out that it wasn’t just a few grandmothers who made it, it was every grandmother in Montana!”

The Painted Rocks partners and some of their children spent three weeks last spring picking enough dandelion blossoms to make that first batch. You rarely, if ever, see dandelion wine for sale, simply because it’s so time-consuming and labor-intensive that, unless you’re an adventurous outfit like Painted Rocks, there’s no way to sell it competitively for a price that reflects the amount of work that went into it. Only the freshest blossoms should be picked, and only the petals can be used. The green parts, containing a milky latex that can turn the wine bitter, must be meticulously separated and discarded by hand.

It’s a hell of a lot of work, but if you’ve got a sunny spring day with nothing in particular to do, and if you don’t mind selling your labor back to yourself at something less than a premium, the initial investment will pay itself back many times over with a few gallons of precious yellow sunshine in a bottle. Here’s a simple recipe for a semi-sweet dandelion mead (not, I should emphasize, Painted Rocks Winery’s) that you can experiment with as you like. The recipe presumes a basic grounding in beer- and winemaking procedure, particularly concerning proper sanitation. If you’ve never tried it before, consider looking into a book on the subject. You’ll need: a three-gallon glass carboy, a clean three-gallon food-grade plastic bucket with lid, enough sterilized bottles and caps or corks to manage about two gallons of finished mead, and a few ingredients available at homebrew shops that will come up as we go along.

Gather wide-open dandelions, stem and all, on a warm, dry day and away from major roadways and areas you suspect may have been sprayed for weeds. A large paper grocery bag stuffed almost full should be enough to produce at least two or three quarts of loosely-packed petals. You must remove all the green parts. I find that an effective way to do this is to roll the green “bulb” containing the petals between a thumb and forefinger, squeezing gently until the yellow petals pop out. After a little practice, you’ll be able to come up with three quarts of petals in about two hours.

Rinse the petals in a colander or mesh strainer under cold tap water. Place petals in three-gallon bucket. Put two gallons of water on to boil, and add eight pounds of honey (buy in bulk) to the bucket containing the petals. Pour boiling water over dandelions and honey, conserving some of the hot water to rinse any remaining honey out of honey container. Add 1/2 ounce of citric acid (from the homebrew store) and 1/2 pint of very strong, freshly-made black tea. Stir with sterile spoon to dissolve honey. Add two to three washed oranges, quartered, first squeezing them into mixture and then adding the quarters skin and all. Repeat process with two lemons.

Allow liquid to cool to room temperature (several hours) and add half a package of wine yeast and yeast nutrient (both from homebrew shop; follow directions on nutrient packet). If you like, at this point you may add herbs or spices—I favor a handful (about a cup) of crushed fresh catnip leaves and half a cup or so of bee-balm leaves and flowers. Try whatever tickles your fancy, but go easy on very strong spices like ginger, cloves and nutmeg until you have a better idea what you like.

Cover bucket loosely with lid and ferment at room temperature for five to six days. Strain out flowers and fruit with sterilized mesh strainer and return liquid to fermenting vessel. Cover as before and ferment for an additional five or six days. Pour into three-gallon carboy and fit with fermentation lock. When all fermentation has ceased (which sometimes takes two months or more), siphon through sterile plastic tube into bottles and cap or cork.

Now comes the really hard part: Wait until at least Christmas, and preferably until after Easter to begin drinking. The mead should be good to drink the following winter (although, as the winemaker, it’s up to you when to start drinking—whenever it tastes good to you, that’s the time to start enjoying it), but the longer you wait, the better it will be.

Mead-meaking can be a private hobby or a very social activity from beginning to end. Picking and de-greening the flowers, especially, is the kind of labor that lends itself well to a dandelion bee with several good and patient friends sitting on the steps chewing the fat with music coming out the front door. Drinking the finished product, on the other hand, is an absolutely social occasion. Try it at room temperature (pouring it with one smooth motion into the glass or glasses, leaving behind the thin layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle) or over ice with a slice of fruit or a sprig of crushed mint.

No matter how far along your mead is, you pretty much have to open a bottle on the feast day of St. Bartholomew, August 24. Bartholomew is the patron saint of honey and beekeepers, and by extension, of meadmakers. Raising your glass to St. Bartholomew is a nice way of thanking him for helping bring in the honey crop; one sip of your dandelion mead and you’ll be extra glad he did.

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