Best honey wines to sip on summer evenings
Best: overall
Hive Mind's meads are the perfect tessellation of the traditional and contemporary, and all with sustainably-sourced Welsh honey at their core. This is the Hiraeth, a heather mead that brings the deepest floral notes of the Wye Valley to your glass.
As someone who is sensitive to sweetness in even drier meads, the Hiraeth is a welcome serve. And as someone who did a lot of growing-up in tents knocked up around Wales' various national parks, the name Hiraeth – which, ham-fistedly translated from Welsh, describes a bittersweet, loving homesickness for a time or place you can't retread – is a hugely evocative one, particularly when it comes to the flavour profiles locked into this powerful glass.
The nose is quite sweet, with some familiar honey richness encapsulating lilts of flowerbud and freshly crumpled leaf. As the glass warms, the vegetal notes take a bolder stance, bringing some savouriness to your nostrils. This is an entirely different mead by mouth, though.
The profile of the heather honey is enough to signify sweetness without dealing it in spades; the scaffolding of this mead is the almost-brackish body, pulling damp, peppery shrub, mineral-rich soil and barely-saline valley fog into something more like a sense memory than a tasting note.
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