Sky River Meadery

Denice Ingalls, owner of and winemaker for Sky River Meadery, has a sweet thing going. Using select honeys, she employs advanced techniques refined at Cornell University to create honey wine (a.k.a. mead). This is a non-tannin zone: You won’t find any grapes around its Sultan production facility. Instead, what you will find are three different premium honey wines: Sky River Sweet Mead (6 percent residual sugar); Sky River Semi-Sweet Mead (3 percent residual sugar) and Sky River Dry Mead (less than 1 percent residual sugar). Choosing among the three wines depends upon your taste preferences and what’s for dinner. The Sky River Sweet Mead is excellent as an aperitif, whereas the Sky River Dry Mead pairs nicely with pan-Asian cuisine and Northwest seafood. Each mead sells for around $12 a bottle.

Working with a variety of honey suppliers from around the world, Denice chooses honeys for color, flavor, aromatics and sugars, not unlike traditional winemakers working closely with grape growers. However, her “farmers” are bees, rather than growers from the Columbia Valley. At wine tasting events, she is surrounded by traditional grape wine vintners who go to great lengths to explain why their merlot is different from their neighbor’s. Denice, however, has no explaining to do. Honey wine is unique, and her product alone sets her apart.

It also helps that mead wine is rich in lore from ancient Europe. For example, Greeks called mead “ambrosia” or nectar of the gods, believing that gods drank mead. Consequently, the Greeks thought that mead had magical and sacred properties. The term “honeymoon” comes from the ancient tradition of giving bridal couples a moon’s worth of honey wine. For a quick and interesting read, there are a number of other honey-wine-related tales and anecdotes noted on the Sky River Meadery website (see www.skyriverbrewing.com).