THE DRINK OF THE GODS.

• Author: DANE, CHARLES B. JR.
• Position: Sparkling dry mead from Heidrun Meadery

Even as consumers become more sophisticated in their tastes for food and wine, there is a desire to recapture the directness and simplicity of production of the past. Here is a story of one man's attempt to revive a forgotten drink.

In Arcata, Calif., located 275 miles north of San Francisco in Humboldt County, redwoods older than Christ stand watch over the Pacific. Humboldt's vaporous forests can lead you to world-famous cannabis on the one hand and environmental activists like the tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill on the other. In May 1998, Gordon Hull opened Heidrun Meadery on the outskirts of Arcata, giving the bohemian community a product that is both exotic and ecologically important.

Heidrun is the world's only commercial producer of sparkling dry mead, a champagne-like libation made from fermented honey and water. Chef Stan Frankenthaler, of Salamander in Cambridge, Mass., praises Hulrs sparkling dry mead for its "good style and complication." Contrasting it to many Chardonnays and sparkling wines he has had, Frankenthaler says Heidrun "is food-friendly, but at the same time it has a life of its own."

In addition to being food-friendly, mead is earth-friendly. To produce honey, the beekeeper simply allows the honeybee (Apis mellifera) to do what it has done naturally for millions of years--forage on flowering plants for nectar and pollen. Honeybees require no pesticides, irrigation, or any manipulation of the land. And, most importantly, honeybees provide an extremely valuable service to the world by pollinating hundreds of important crops.

While sparkling dry mead may be new to diners in top American restaurants like The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., mead is generally considered the world's oldest alcoholic beverage. The oldest material evidence of mead has been established recently. Archeologists have used state-of-the-art chemical analyses to detect traces of mead in five-thousand year-old drinking vessels found in Scotland and Denmark.

Although neither the Celts nor the Vikings invented mead, they were arguably its most enthusiastic proponents. The berserkers, the vanguard of the Celtic and Viking fighters, toasted with mead before roaring off to make savagery with the Roman legions. And it is from Norse mythology that Gordon Hull found the name for his ultra-modern meadery. The chief god of the Norse, a one-eyed doomster named Odin, ate nothing and subsisted entirely on the mead that flowed from the teats of his goat...