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The oldest drink
Honey wine, or mead, is widely considered the oldest alcoholic drink. Honey diluted with rainwater ferments by itself, so it needed no farming and no invention, only discovery. The earliest chemical evidence of a fermented drink anywhere, from about 7000 BCE, contains honey.
Picture a hollow tree with a wild bees' nest in it, a heavy rain and a few warm weeks. The honey-water that collects will ferment, because yeast is everywhere. Whoever first tasted that was drinking mead. Every culture that kept bees, or robbed wild ones, seems to have worked out the rest.
Ancient honey wine: China, India, Greece and Rome
China, around 7000 BCE. Pottery jars from the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan province, were analyzed by the archaeochemist Patrick McGovern and colleagues in 2004. The residue pointed to a mixed fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit. It is the earliest chemically confirmed alcoholic beverage found so far.
Bronze Age Europe. Pollen and residue in drinking vessels from burials in Scotland and Denmark show that honey-based drinks, sometimes flavored with meadowsweet, bog myrtle or berries, were being buried with the dead well over three thousand years ago.
India. The hymns of the Rigveda praise madhu, a honeyed drink. The word is a direct cousin of "mead".
Greece and Rome. The Greeks called mead hydromeli, honey-water, and some of their myths treat it as older than wine. Aristotle mentions it. Pliny the Elder describes it. Around 60 CE the agricultural writer Columella set down what is usually called the oldest surviving recipe: take rainwater that has been stored for years, mix it with honey, and leave it in the sun for forty days. The Romans were fonder still of mulsum, which is wine sweetened with honey and not mead at all.
Mead halls: the Norse, the Saxons and the Celts
In northern Europe, where grapes would not grow, mead became the drink of kings. The great hall in Beowulf, Heorot, is a mead hall, and sharing the mead cup is how a lord bound his warriors to him. The Welsh poem Y Gododdin remembers a war band that feasted on mead for a year before riding to their deaths at Catraeth, paying for their mead with their lives.
Norse myth put mead at the center of things. The Mead of Poetry, brewed from honey and the blood of the wise being Kvasir, made a poet of anyone who drank it, and Odin stole it for gods and men. In Valhalla the goat Heidrun stands on the roof eating the leaves of a great tree, and from her udder runs an endless supply of mead for the fallen.
Ordinary Vikings mostly drank ale. Honey was precious, which is exactly why mead carried such status.
Africa and the tej tradition
Africa has some of the oldest continuous honey wine traditions on earth. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, tej has been made for many centuries: honey and water fermented with gesho, a bitter shrub that plays the part of hops. For a long time it was reserved for the emperor's court. It is now the national drink, served from round berele flasks in tej houses across the country. Further south, the Xhosa people of South Africa make a honey drink called iQhilika, and honey beers and wines are brewed by forest beekeeping communities across the continent.
Poland, Lithuania and the great age of mead
Nowhere took mead more seriously than the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish miód pitny is still graded by how much honey goes into it: czwórniak (one part honey to three of water), trójniak (one to two), dwójniak (one to one) and the legendary półtorak (two parts honey to one of water), which needs years of aging. In 2008 the European Union registered all four as Traditional Specialities Guaranteed.
Why mead nearly disappeared
Three things pushed mead to the margins between the late Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.
- Cheaper alternatives. As farming improved, beer and wine could be made in volume from grain and grapes. Honey could not scale the same way.
- Sugar. Once cane sugar arrived from the colonies, honey stopped being Europe's main sweetener and beekeeping shrank.
- Less demand for wax. Monasteries kept bees largely for church candles, and mead was a by-product. Where monasteries were dissolved, the hives often went with them.
Mead survived in pockets: in Poland and Lithuania, in Ethiopia, in Brittany, and among English country winemakers.
The honeymoon story
You will often read that honeymoon comes from a custom of giving a newly married couple enough mead to last one moon, to bring luck and children. It is a lovely idea, and mead certainly was a wedding drink in much of Europe. But the earliest written uses of the word, in sixteenth-century English, explain it differently: the first month of marriage is the sweetest, and like the moon it starts to wane as soon as it is full. The mead version only turns up centuries later. Tell it at weddings anyway, ideally over a glass of sparkling honey wine.
The modern revival
Mead's comeback began with homebrewers in the late twentieth century and gathered pace with the craft drinks boom. The United States had a few dozen commercial meaderies at the turn of the millennium and has hundreds today, along with a trade body, the American Mead Makers Association, founded in 2012. Most of that growth has been in sweet, fruited and flavored styles sold from taprooms.
A smaller group of producers has gone the other way, treating honey as a fine-wine ingredient: dry styles, single honey varietals, barrel aging, second fermentation for sparkling wines. That is the corner of the category this site is most interested in, and it is where our best honey wine picks come from.
Frequently asked questions
Is mead the oldest alcoholic drink?
Quite possibly. Honey and water ferment on their own when wild yeast gets in, so people could have found mead long before they farmed grain or grapes. The oldest chemical evidence of any fermented drink, from Jiahu in China around 7000 BCE, includes honey.
Did Vikings really drink mead?
Yes, though ale was the everyday drink. Honey was scarce in Scandinavia, so mead was for feasts, chieftains and gods. In Norse myth it flows from the udder of the goat Heidrun to feed the warriors of Valhalla.
What did the ancient Greeks call honey wine?
Hydromeli, literally honey-water, for fermented mead. Wine mixed with honey was a different drink: oenomel to the Greeks and mulsum to the Romans.
What is the oldest mead recipe?
The oldest surviving detailed recipe is usually credited to the Roman writer Columella, around 60 CE: store rainwater for several years, mix it with honey, and leave the jar in the sun for forty days.
Does the word honeymoon come from mead?
It makes a good story, but probably not. The earliest recorded uses of honeymoon, from the 1500s, are about the first sweet month of marriage fading like the moon. The mead explanation appears much later.
Which countries have a honey wine tradition today?
Ethiopia and Eritrea (tej and mes), Poland (miód pitny), Lithuania (midus), the Nordic countries (mjød), Germany (Met), Brittany (chouchen), the Czech Republic and Slovakia (medovina), and South Africa (iQhilika), along with a fast-growing craft scene in the United States.