We see a lot of people each year in our tasting room. Many of them come to see what mead is all about. Some come to see the Mead Hall we’ve built. Most of them come to do a tasting. Many people are curious about mead, having never had it before, others have a long-time love affair with mead. Some are nervous about doing a tasting.
What if I don’t like it? What if it’s too sweet?
We love showing people what makes mead amazing and are always happy to answer questions. Especially, how do I do a tasting? Do I have to spit it in the bucket? What’s up with swirling?
Here at Starrlight Mead, we teach the 3 S’s of wine/mead tasting (others will teach anywhere from 5 to 7 steps!): Swirl, Sniff, Sip.
Swirl
Swirling the mead in your glass isn’t just to make you look pretentious, there’s actually a method to our madness! The easiest way to swirl is to leave your glass on a table or counter, hold the stem like a pencil, and go around in circles like you are drawing on the table. This should rotate the wine without sloshing all over.
Try this experiment – pour a small amount of wine/mead in your glass just out of the bottle. Give it a sniff. You’ll get some aromas, but not much usually. Then give it a swirl and smell it again. You should get a lot more aromas from your wine/mead.
Swirling opens up the “bouquet” – the aromas of the mead and allows you to smell more of the good things to come.
Sniff
Where you can only taste 5 basic qualities, the human nose can smell over 1 trillion different scents! If you don’t smell what you are eating (think about the last time you had a stuffy nose!), your food doesn’t taste right. That’s because what we smell informs our brain of how something is going to taste. Sniffing your mead gives your brain a head’s up about how it might taste.
Smell your mead gently as if you are smelling a flower. Breathe in deeply and gently.
Sip
Take a sip of your mead. Make sure you get enough in your mouth to swish it around and get to all your taste buds involved in the fun. Then take a second sip! Often, the first sip is mixing with whatever flavors you had in your mouth before the sip – water, crackers, coffee. The second sip is a much better indication of how it’s really tastes to you.
Fun fact – we have had meads that taste completely different on the second sip! You are missing out if you throw it all back at once. Anyone remember the Current Mead?
Some tastings will suggest Slurping as a way to pull air through the wine. Ben can do this. I, Becky, end up coughing and choaking when I try! Give it a try… or not!
Anna Haddock photographer
The question of spitting – if you are out enjoying a mead tasting, you do not need to spit. If you are judging a competition or trying a lot of different meads at one sitting, you might want to spit to keep yourself from getting too drunk or judging the meads unfairly at the end.
These steps help you to get the full experience of the mead, but when it comes right down to it, you can taste your mead any way you’d like.