We've been making mead for 25 years now. But 2009 marks the first time we've ever made a champange mead, also known as a sparkling mead.... Unfortunately, that wasn't what we intended to do.
We were sitting in the front room the other night when we heard a "whump" in the kitchen. Edward got up to look, only to see a cork had popped on one of the bottles of mead that we had in the wine rack. It was foaming out all over the rug.
Back when we were living in Maryland, back when we knew others still making mead, we'd gotten a bottle from a friend. It was corked and labeled and set on it's side in our closet off the living room. We noticed one day that the cork was pushed out somewhat. We pushed it back in and thought "we should keep an eye on that..." Time passed, it pushed out a little again every once and a while and we pushed it back in. Then we went away for a weekend.
When we got back we noticed that there was a heady, sweet smell in the living room that got stronger the nearer you got to the closet. When we opened the door we knew why immediately. That bottle had popped it's cork and about half of the mead in it had spilled onto the carpet on the floor of the closet.
Back in those days we didn't have a carpet cleaner. Back in those days all we had were towels and warm water. We soaked and scrubbed and rinsed for a long time. It didn't really help. The mead had had enough time to soak well into the carpet. From that point forward, whenever we opened that closet door, you could smell, ever so faintly, the rich aroma of honey... It was forever dubbed the Mead Closet...
We've never had this happen before. At least not with one of our bottles. Which is why we were somewhat embarrassed when this bottle popped last night.
We like to share our mead. We gave away nine bottles this year. Several of which have turned out to be of the sparkling variety. At this point, all the bottles have been accounted for, and the current owners duly notified. So far, three bottles have turned out sparkling, another sparkled only barely. We poured some from the bottle that popped. It looked like champagne. All we can figure is that it must not have died completely and when bottled, it started a secondary fermentation. We do use champagne yeast, which may have had something to do with it, though as I said before, we've never had this happen. The last two bottles we filled were the two that we kept ourselves. One of those popped.
The good news was we heard it pop and Edward got to it before more then about a glass worth spilled. He quickly grabbed the bottle and used his thumb to stop the flow. I started grabbing towels and throwing them on the spill. There was mead on the carpet, on the wine rack, the kitchen floor and island and the bottom of the barstools (four feet away). We don't think it soaked too far into the carpet. We had to get out our big carpet cleaner and run it over the whole area. We can only hope that we got all of it up.
We opened the only other bottle we had left from that batch that night as well. As soon as Edward broke the seal, we could tell it was under pressure and it started to bubble. Who knows how long it would have been before it popped as well.
For years we've thought about trying to make a sparkling mead... the operative word being "trying", not having it happen accidentally. Thus, we have a small stock of champagne bottles, plastic champagne corks and few of the wires to tie them down. Why not try to bottle up the remaining sparkling mead in a bottle designed for it? So that's what we did. We cleaned and sterilized a bottle and cork, then carefully transferred the mead to the new bottle. It foamed just like champagne. Then, we carefully corked the bottle and tightened the wire over it. We even had a spare label. Hopefully, there will be enough carbonation (or additional fermentation) to keep it sparkling when we open it again.
We've kept a record of all the batches of mead that we've made since 1990. We've added a note that the most of the 2009 bottles have come out sparkling. There wasn't much indication that this would happen when we bottled back in November, but we should have known something was up when the first person to open their bottle reported a pop and "magical smoke" rising from the neck. Luckily, no other bottle has popped, especially during shipping. That could have caused more trouble then I care to think about.
Maybe we'll try to make a sparkling mead again. We have more champagne bottles and a few more corks, but we'll have to buy more wires. We've kept them in case we needed them. We just didn't realize we would need them this year.
How did the mead taste? Wonderful. Magical. Dry, but not harsh. I wonder if we can do that again if we tried. Maybe next time we'll try to do it on purpose, instead of accidentally...
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