It was our great pleasure at The Wine Bottega to have Garth from our favorite local Meadery, Green River Ambrosia, join us this past Wednesday for our first ever Mead Fest!  We met Garth a couple months ago while preparing for an event that featured local organic agriculturalists and international music.  The Wine Bottega took part by pairing wines with local honeys and we serendipitously encountered Garth (the quintessential name for a mead brewmeister!).   Boston has a great core group of mead enthusiasts and we at The Bottega had been searching for the best way to really dive into this ancient fermented brew.  Green River Ambrosia is a three man operation located in Greenfield, Massachusetts, just a couple hours to our west. 

The three friends embarked on their mead adventure just two years or in their words “two brews” ago.  They are dedicated to learning as much as they can about the world’s oldest fermented drink; a combination of water, honey and yeast-what Beowulf called “mead drink”.  The raw, unfiltered honey is collected by a neighboring apiculturist and any herbs or aromatic infusions, such as chamomile, are raised locally and organically; allowing for the most natural of products.  We tasted a lineup of four meads ranging from traditional to inventive.  The “Dry Reserve” is an early bottling of the classic “Liquid Sunshine” and has a residual yeastiness and slight “spritz” that  are reminiscent of a fine summer ale.  “Liquid Sunshine” is the most traditional of the meads, it harkens back to the mead halls and chain mail of the Middle Ages with its fine honey texture.  The most novel of the meads was the “Cassis”, made with black currants from a small farm in Springfield, VT. This mead is dark violet and has a tart and crisp and very rustic edge that we all agreed reminded us of some our favorite Italian farmhouse style wines.  When mixed with the “Dry Reserve” it formed a “Mead Royale” that was truly tasty and refreshing.  Finally, there was the “Chamomile” mead, which was simply an infusion of organic chamomile flowers with the classic mead.  This creates a heady aroma of white wildflowers and finishes with soft silkiness-a combination that Garth called the “brewmaster’s choice”.  The meads are all unfined and unfiltered which allows the true essence of the land and fields to shine through.  What I found most intriguing was the true sense of “terroir” that each mead showed.  It’s nice to think that even though we don’t live in a major wine growing region here in Boston that it is still possible to experience products that demonstrate our local terroir and that have a real sense of place.   Garth spoke about his meads much like a humble winemaker; demonstrating his desire to be in tune with nature and to experiment and better capture its unique characteristics.  With more meads and new concoctions on the way, we at The Bottega look forward to Green River Ambrosia’s next release of compelling brews. Be on the lookout for an apple-mead when the season comes around!
A presto-
Matt