Middle Mountain Mead is an artisan honey winery combining the best of ancient and modern techniques to create small lots of premium handcrafted mead. 

What is mead? Mead is wine made from honey and water, optionally flavoured with herbs, spices, teas, and other botanical elements.

Why are we making mead? It all began with a packet of lavender seeds!  Helen has a passion for growing plants, mostly herbs, especially lavender. She ordered a package of lavender seeds and after a few years we had more lavender than we knew what to do with!  She started researching the various uses to which herbs are put, and kept seeing intriguing references to mead.  We got more and more interested, and finally we were hooked.  Some of the things we found out:

Mead is humankind's oldest fermented beverage (from before 8,000BCE, possibly as far back as 30,000BCE which means Neandertal man could have enjoyed a cup of mead before disappearing about 23,000BCE). Mead is found on every continent except Antarctica (and there might be an unknown civilization buried under the icecap that once enjoyed mead - who knows what we'll find when the ice melts!). It originated independently in diverse cultures including Egyptian, Celtic, Indian, African and Scandinavian. The word "medicine" is derived from "metheglin" (pronounced muh-theg'-lin), the name for herb-infused mead.

Mead was the only wine of northern Europe until grape wines became available about 6,000 years ago. Cheap imports of sugar after the discovery of the Americas in 1492 resulted in mead becoming increasingly expensive until finally it was available only to the very wealthy and was virtually forgotten by the common folk.

What most impressed us, however, were persistent references to mead in the ancient mythologies, which lead to the dawning realization that mead is a long-forgotten central element of humankind's earliest spiritual awareness, commemorated in rituals of celebration and remembrance that in modern times are presented as little-understood rote performances

• the traditional mulled wine offered at Christmas was originally a gigantic cauldron of mead kept continually full in the mead-hall;
• celebrating the launch of a ship by breaking a bottle of champagne on its bow was originally an offering of mead to the gods asking them to bless the ship;
• honeymoon referred to the ancient practice of giving the newlyweds enough mead to drink for a month to ensure a fruitful beginning to their union.

We found the history of mead so fascinating and enriching that we decided we should develop an artisan honey winery and see if we couldn't help along the global renaissance of mead. We started making mead, and it tasted pretty good. We visited lots of wineries to see how they make mead, and tasted many very good meads. We got inspired by all the possibilities to create specialty meads. With the help of friends and neighbours, we developed a superbly equipped winery and have now produced meads as good as or better than any we've ever tasted.

Our winery is set on Middle Mountain Farm, 3505 Euston Road Hornby Island. There are terraced hillsides full of plantings including about 2,000 lavender plants blooming in June-July. We also grow black currants, apples, and grapes, and are stewards of some beehives as well. Our tasting room features woven willow screens and display areas created by Alastair Heseltine.

In the summer months, we're offering tastings on the deck Tuesday-Saturday 1-5pm. We hope you drop by and visit. Mead is available for sale in the tasting room, as well as culinary herb blends and herb teas. 

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