Medovina Paonia Peach

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 9 | Mouthfeel: 6 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

My wonderful sister trekked north out from her work in downtown to pick up a case of assorted meads from the Medovina Meadery. I’d tasted Sweet Melissa (still my top mead ever), thanks to Springslicker a year or so ago and ever since I’ve been itching try more of their extremely difficult to find line of meads. I thought I had my chance when my sister moved to Denver and we made arrangements to visit her for Christmas. Unfortunately, the big blizzard hit and although we did do some beer shopping, apparently Medovina is tough to find in stores even in Denver. Frustrated that I was unable to score more mead, I e-mailed Mark Beran, the mead-maker and owner of Medovina, to get an assortment of meads for my sister to bring back to Georgia checked as luggage. Mark packed for shipping a variety of meads he had on hand and my sister, who was impressed with his meadery and the meadmaker himself, lugged the package off to the airport. Jump forward to tonight, a week after she dropped off the meads. The Paonia Peach is the first mead I’ve opened from the shipment, which includes about 7 more meads I’ve never tried in addition to a couple of Sweet Melissas. This is a 330 ml bottle, corked and capped with bee’s wax. This is a still mead and the slightly hazed golden liquid has a faint pink-orange glow. The aroma up front is honey, alcohol, and a spicy floral quality almost like gardenias. The peach is reserved, providing a vague fruit juiciness backing up the up-front flavors and becoming more obvious on the exhale. There’s an almost lime-like citric quality in there as well. This is the driest of the meads I’ve ever had, and it’s only marked as off-dry. This is by no means the gem that is Sweet Melissa, but it does nothing but reinforce my belief that Medovina is doing amazing things. Also, just as a note to mead novices, meads seem to be best at a low room temperature or only lightly chilled. The flavor on this one improved drastically the warmer it got and it only spent 20 minutes in the fridge followed by a 5 minute warmup.