Mad for Mead

Sonoma County producers give the ancient honey-based beverage a modern twist.

By SHELBY POPE Photography by CHRIS HARDY

RENA WALLACE WAS ON A COASTAL ROAD TRIP six years ago when she spotted it. “I saw the sign and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, mead — who does that?’” she says of her first glimpse of Point Reyes’ Heidrun Meadery. Curious about the honey wine that many consider the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage, she stopped in, and after tasting Heidrun’s subtle, bubbly meads, she was in love.

A Mendocino County native, Wallace grew up a self-described “cellar brat,” thanks to her grandmother’s job in the business office and tasting room at Parducci Winery. Already an avid homebrewer, she soon bought a mead-making kit and started experimenting.

Now, the results of her years of tinkering are fermenting away in an old creamery on a bucolic Penngrove farm, nearly ready to be served to the public. Wallace is the new co-owner of Sonoma Aperitif, and she’s relaunching the brand to emphasize her delicate, champagne-like meads.

She’s not alone in her interest in the ancient drink. Spicy Vines Winery in Healdsburg collaborates with a local honey company to produce a wildflower mead, and the Beverage People in Santa Rosa, where Wallace bought her first supplies, has a slow but steady trickle of customers buying mead-making kits.

“I think mead is a very special beverage. A lot of people like something a little bit different,” Wallace says. And while all mead is made from the same simple recipe — just honey, water, and sometimes yeast — styles vary. Some are syrupy-sweet, others are drier. Some are made with fruits, some with spices.

Wallace and her assistant mead maker, Jeremy Lewis, make mead in the pét-nat style, where a small amount of honey is added to the mead after bottling to activate any leftover yeast, creating a light carbonation. “So it’s very palatable, it’s very easy to drink, and it’s effervescent and kind of tickles the palate,” she says. Wallace serves her dry meads in small cocktail glasses and says they pair well with seafood and spicy cuisine. The three that Sonoma Aperitif is debuting this summer include a sparkling mead, a fruit-infused sparkler, and a beer-like “India Pale Mead.”

For more than a decade, Wallace bounced around different roles in the wine industry, working in accounting, sales, and compliance before moving to the other side of the business in 2017. She launched a craft cidery called Acre and Spade, and when she heard that Laura Hagar-Rush, then owner of Sonoma Aperitif, wanted to move on from producing her fruit-forward aperitifs, Wallace saw the ideal opportunity to showcase her love of mead. She also decided to turn the property into a collaborative enterprise.

Now, several businesses share the sprawling Denman Ranch, a county-designated historical landmark: there’s Acre and Spade, 1881 Vineyards, and a homebrewing club called the Brewer’s Beer Barn.

With her new endeavor at Sonoma Aperitif, Wallace joins a long history of mead makers.

Mead is thought to be the world’s oldest fermented beverage, and there are signs that it was made in China as far back as 7000 B.C. and in Europe around 2800 B.C. In the U.S., it was occasionally made at wineries; in the 1970s, Sonoma County winery Davis Bynum produced mead for a Southern California renaissance fair. During the early craft beer days of the ’70s and ’80s, homebrewers started to produce it again. The founding of Heidrun Meadery in 1997

Rena Wallace, co-owner of Sonoma Aperitif, with assistant mead maker Jeremy Lewis

JULY/AUG 2019 sonomamag.com 57

~Rena Wallace