Honey wine is an old drink. It’s arguably as old as they come, depending on which agricultural historians you engage five glasses deep.
This quintessential, foundational fermented beverage is far more than a novelty drink purchased at Christmas markets and Renaissance fairs; it’s a multi-cultural megalith, at once deeply simple in design and deeply complex in flavours, scents and the sheer science that goes into making something mead-like.
The Mead Cinematic Universe is a broad one, and a subject of great investment and import for artisanal makers of all sizes. There’s a mead for everything, from lower-alcohol hydromels to fortified sack meads to fruity-flavoured melomels to so many more besides. All, though, are derived from a simple, singular event: the fermentation of honey.
Amazing that such a singular event can conceive such a wide variety of smells and flavours – honey wine is just as complex a beverage as any grape-borne wine. There are variables galore, even just in the basic ingredients of honey, water and yeast – for instance, the flowers visited by a given beehive greatly impact the resulting flavour profile of the honey, just as evergreen variables like fermentation time and sugar content inform the character of the resulting brew.
It is this that makes mead such a vibrant scene, typified by smaller makers with hyper-local sources and unavoidably unique approaches to process and tradition.
Growing awareness, changing tastes and a general widening interest in more complex tasting notes have led honey wine to enjoy a strong, steady revival; Steven Sturgeon, of Lyme Bay Winery, has an a tangible feel for honey wine’s growing popularity from an industry perspective.
“Mead, or honey wine, is not really as much of a niche as many buyers and drinkers assume. Global mead sales were almost $600m in 2024 – and projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11 per cent by 2032, which is more than many other BWS (Beer, Wine and Spirits) products. [It] satisfies the growing demand for new and exciting fruit, floral and savoury flavours. We see its popularity driven by the shift from stronger alcohol beverages to wines and lower ABV alternatives.”
From groundbreakers to traditionalists to meaderies finding new ground amongst wine drinkers, there’s a tipple for everyone – and, barring one or two, all are mead at its most truthful: a beverage made from honey, water, yeast and little else.
Best honey wines to buy at a glance
- Best overall: Hive Mind Hiraeth Heather Mead - £30, Hive Mind Mead and Brew Co
- Best for a full-bodied late-summer sipper: Stone Circle Mead Co. Elderflower - £19.95, Stone Circle Mead Co.
- Best for your next cheese board: Loxwood Meadworks Festival - £20.98, Master of Malt
- Best for adding mead flavours to cocktails: Chalice Mead Woodland Hawthorn - £24.95, Amazon
- Best for a quaffable afternoon glass: Gosnells of London Mead - £12.50, Gosnells of London
- Best for barrel-aged brilliance: Hive Mind Oak Whisky Barrel-Aged Mead - £30.99, Selfridges
- Best for bochet-borne indulgence: Gosnells Banana Bochet - £25, Gosnells of London
- Best for a big, buttery white-wine alternative: Loxwood Meadworks Sussex Sunset - £22, Loxwood Meadworks
- Best for effervescent hydromel-ic haze: Gosnell’s Hazy Nectar - £32.50 (12 cans), Gosnells of London
- Best for festive flaves incomparable: Stone Circle Mead Co. Spiced Orange - £19.95, Stone Circle Mead Co.
- Best for a sweet-tooth glass of fruited pyment: Cornish Mead Co. Blackberry Mead - £16.50, Cornish Mead Co.
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Hive Mind Hiraeth Heather Mead
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.
Some may find this a challenging sip, but I find it a vitally comforting one.
Buy now £30.00, Hive Mind
Stone Circle Mead Co. Elderflower
Best for: a full-bodied late-summer sipper
Stone Circle Mead Co. may be a Wiltshire meadery, but it’s Welsh at heart – with Welsh mead-making principles and flavours behind each bottle. So true is Stone Circle to this practice that it supplies mead to the Senedd! Stone Circle has a few flavours to its name, but here I have the Elderflower edition.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a great deal of elderflower on the nose, though backed by a powerful acidity reminiscent of a robust coastal white wine. There’s some real tartness and a distinguished mineral body. As the glass slowly comes up to temperature, a yeasty sourness develops, not dissimilar to the deep horse blanket of a wild-fermented ale (for instance, a lightly bottle-aged Orval).
This mead has an astonishing presence on the tongue; the extremely light effervescence, coupled with a first-impression spike of honey body, creates the impression of it melting in your mouth. It begins and ends with encouraging, sophisticated sweetness, bookending a bright, tart stretch of floral caramel that simply must be experienced. The elderflower never cloys, demands or overwhelms – it’s tastefully there, lingering in the nose, on the palate and in your empty glass. With time, that same horse blanket brings extra oomph to the glass too.
Stone Circle’s Elderflower mead is a late summer-evening must-have, in no uncertain terms.
Buy now £19.95, Stone Circle Mead Co.
Loxwood Meadworks Festival
Best for: your next cheese board
Loxwood Meadworks is a contemporary producer of honey wines in West Sussex, born from humble beginnings selling small-batch mead at the Loxwood Joust – and of a shrewd recognition that there was space for something else in British mead.
That ‘something else’ is here in the Festival, Loxwood Meadworks’ signature bottle. Named for the very Joust at which the Meadworks was conceived, you could call this their manifesto – a light, lilting glass with a trapdoor, designed to interrogate the palates of those otherwise wedded to wine. The nose is elderflower and gooseberry, reminiscent of a bright, tart white if not for the lick of local honey holding it all in place.
The palate is acidic first and last, a refreshing brightness and zing carrying pome-fruit and even quince; briefly, some satiating honey sweetness blooms on the tongue, before a long, semi-dry finish tightens everything back up again.
Despite the ‘grab’, it’s exceedingly light – and would lend itself extremely well to a subtle, sharp white cheese (and maybe some pickled chillies on the side).
Buy now £20.98, Master of Malt
Chalice Mead Woodland Hawthorn
Best for: adding mead flavours to cocktails
Chalice Mead is a Cheltenham-borne brand with an exciting range of forward-thinking honey wines – amongst which you’ll find this beautifully balanced bottle of Woodland Hawthorn.
On the nose, there are incredibly dense notes of forest foraging – as if the experience itself, of picking berries from a wild hedgerow, could be cooked down into a rich jam. There’s a sophisticated sweetness in it, with a developed foundation that suggests a fortified wine of far higher percentage.
The Woodland Hawthorn is even more delightful to taste, with clear honey richness that spreads across the palate with news of juicy currants and savoury bark and root. It’s easier to drink than its flavours suggest, and much lighter on the liver too.
It’s phenomenal on its own, but I recommend it in your posh-cocktail experiments (particularly as a substitute for sweet vermouth).
Buy now £24.95, Amazon
Gosnells of London Mead
Best for: a quaffable afternoon glass
Gosnells of London is a boundary-pushing mead-maker, using 11 years of honey-brewing experience to create sweet and sometimes-sparkling bevs. Here’s their bona fide, no-frills, flagship bottle, Gosnells of London Mead – brewed using orange blossom honey, and to 5.5 per cent for especially easy drinking.
Cracking the bottle open reveals some tasteful bottle-conditioning, by way of a light and pleasant effervescence. On the nose, there’s some surprising depth – hints of burnt caramel, apple pie and banana, topped by the tiniest bit of rum-punch rubberiness. As it warms in the glass, a little orange oil even reveals itself.
On the palate, though, it’s a supremely light delight. Bright, sweet and in possession of some pome-fruit juiciness, this bottle is an exceedingly drinkable little joy – backed with some thick, hairy honey tang.
The Gosnells of London Mead is a stunningly accessible pour, ideally enjoyed on a sunny afternoon.
Buy now £12.50, Gosnells of London
Hive Mind Oak Whisky Barrel-Aged Mead
Best for: barrel-aged brilliance
From a Wye Valley mead-making operation comes Hive Mind – a meadery which demonstrably puts a great deal of truck in doing things properly, from the keeping of its own bees to the production of this stand-out mead.
The Oak Whisky Barrel-Aged mead takes Hive Mind’s flagship Traditional Mead (itself a delicious sip, believe me) and matures it in oak ex-whisky casks to great effect. The traditional mead is, by itself, an extremely balanced affair; the time it spends resting on whisky-infused oak only serves to develop things further, imbuing the nose with an addictive, sweetened woody backbone.
The palate is refined too, with a slightly acidic first impression that dries out into vanilla, cinder toffee, and charred kindling. The further you get into your glass, the more you are rewarded – first with subtle honey deepness, then with expressions of citrus peel, and on and on.
This is a beautiful barrel-aged beverage, let alone mead; don’t miss it.
Buy now £30.99, Selfridges
Gosnells Banana Bochet
Best for: bochet-borne indulgence
Another from Gosnells of London, and this time in the form of a highly indulgent, festive bottle of Banana Bochet.
Bochet is a subtype of mead wherein the honey is caramelised before fermentation, leading to a deepening of colour and flavour. This particular bochet benefits from some truly luxurious treatment: it’s oak barrel-aged in ex-Bourbon casks and on fresh bananas too. The result is a brilliant banoffee-like beverage with layers upon layers to unravel.
On the nose, there’s banana in spades – real banana, too, not the good-but-different banana notes you might detect in rums and some meads. Between the caramelised honey and oak ageing, this well and truly smells like a banoffee pie (albeit a boozy one), right down to the pastry.
On the palate, the flavours are much more complex, and rewardingly so. The first impression is pannacotta, butterscotch, crème brulee; tongue-tickling hints of stewed mincemeat (the sweet kind, mind). The banana is a floating presence in the middle, before rich, woody sweetness takes over. The finish carries almost-burnt sugar tightness, and the warmth of the ex-Bourbon oak and a lilt of honey-funk.
This is a beautifully balanced drink with some seductive flavour to it. It lends itself to colder nights and apres-desserts, but feels like it’s there for you to revisit in the early hours for a sneaky midnight glass. Bewitching.
Buy now £25.00, Gosnells of London
Loxwood Meadworks Sussex Sunset
Best for: a big, buttery white-wine alternative
Sussex Sunset is a dry honey wine, and Loxwood’s first foot into oak fermentation; New French Oak brings colour and body to a dry, 11 per cent honey wine that leans ‘white Burgundy’ in flavour and texture.
On the nose, there’s butter and almonds – even a little marzipan, thanks to the sweetness shoring everything up. With time, a slight sourdough breadiness appears, tantalisingly hinting at flavours to come. Indeed, this is a dry sip, with immediate mouth-puckering gooseberry and grapefruit (as if marmaladed, and spread on a slice of fresh-baked sourdough). Honey follows shortly, and is immediately followed by a vibrant, verdant hit of young wood. The body gets butterier, and the finish is deliciously slow, oily, smooth; crème brulee.
This is again surprisingly light for its tasting notes, but nonetheless a cut-through glass of honey wine. I’d pair it with something spicy, fishy and with coconut milk.
Buy now £22.00, Loxwood Meadworks
Gosnells Hazy Nectar
Best for: effervescent hydromel-ic haze
Now for something a little removed from conventional understandings of honey wine – via this, Gosnells of London’s forward-thinking, draught-friendly, mead-esque alternative to other beverages you’d usually find in pint form. This is Gosnells Hazy Nectar, a 4 per cent fizzy drink that positions itself as a honey-brewed cider alternative, and absolutely walks the walk.
It’s an extremely light drink, with a pear-juice-y pale haze to the eye and sweetened-apple notes to the nose. It’s similarly light on the palate, eschewing straight-up sweetness in favour of pear-skin and apple-flesh. There’s a tiny bit of honey richness to be found at the back of the palate, which gives the whole drink a taste framework worthy of the word ‘nectar’.
It’s not expressly mead-y, but it is a refreshing fizzybev well worth a bank holiday look-in.
Buy now £32.50, Gosnells of London
Stone Circle Mead Co. Spiced Orange
Best for: festive flaves incomparable
Another from the impressive Stone Circle, this is their Spiced Orange mead – which sees a small amount of orange juice added before the ferment alongside some classic festive spices. The result is a hugely festive scene that blooms on the nose – clove-forward, with a little cinnamon heat and some incidental cocoa-richness. The orange is understated but broad, supple; it glues the more volatile spice notes together in a sweet, spiced and very adult chocolate orange.
On the palate, this is a supremely luxurious honey wine. There’s a lush velvet about it, an ever-rolling red carpet of nourishing pan-mulling spice notes culminating in some refreshing ginger-y fire. The orange, again, is a subtle but powerful presence, bringing life to those multifarious woody notes.
It’s a maximalist festive sipper, but it’s one that you’ll undoubtedly want to come back to.
Buy now £19.95, Stone Circle Mead Co.
Cornish Mead Co. Blackberry Mead
Best for: a sweet-tooth glass of fruited pyment
Cornish Mead Co.’s Blackberry Mead is technically a pyment, owing to the grape wine base that provides much of the initial fermentational body. That fruity base is further complemented with rich blackberry, and sweetened with more honey. I was trying to avoid such mead-siblings for this guide, but Cornish Mead Co’s a compelling try – and a family operation that has been doing it this way since the Sixties.
This is one of the stronger bottles on my list, coming in at 17 per cent. It’s also one of the sweetest, thanks to that heavy lick of blackberry and some heavy backsweetening. It’s surprisingly thin for its sweetness, and much easier to quaff than it has any right to be.
Drink it as a dessert wine, or stick it at the bottom of your next Bellini.
Buy now £16.50, Cornish Mead Co.
Verdict
I was blown away by Hive Mind’s Hiraeth Heather Mead. The flavours in this bottle are confounding. It may not be the sweet honey booze some would hope (particularly if they’re new to honey wine), but it won my taste buds over with its complex taste equivalent of environmental storytelling.
Another fun bottle was Stone Circle’s Elderflower Mead, which brought clever fermentational flavour and body to a class of beverage that usually suffers from over-floweriness.
