About Us
Sparkling Honey Mead Handcrafted with Love
Our unique sparkling honey mead is handcrafted from our little nook in the New England Tablelands of NSW, between Tenterfield and Glen Innes.
Our mead relies entirely on the bees and the amount of local honey we can acquire through our bee farmers, so our craft mead has more nuanced flavours and changes from one batch to another.
Our Story
36 years of making Mead
Pierre comes from a rural background in South East France, where subsistence farming was the rule. Certain family traditions are hard to give up. Subsistence farming in Provence or in Brittany means self-reliance in food and drink production, in particular wine in Provence where Pierre grew up and mead in Brittany where his mother came from.
​
Pierre attended Meymac Forestry School, and worked in forestry in France, and the pastoral industry in Nevada and North Queensland.
​
Glenice spent many years in healthcare and has always been very aware of the impact that preservatives and chemicals can have on one's body.
​
In 1982, Pierre and Glenice settled on their property in Torrington with their family, running cattle and Arabian horses.
​
Good stands of native timber producing an abundance of honey on the property were of interest to the local apiarist who offered buckets of honey to maintain access to their bee sites.
​
The Mead making started as a personal hobby many years ago, finding a use for an abundant local raw product, to craft a unique and high-quality beverage in keeping with the family traditions.
Meet The Team
Our Sparkling Mead
-
Contains no artificial additives at any stage of the fermentation process.
-
Varies with each seasonal change and in keeping with the specific traits of the honey.
-
Can come in all types of flavour - just like wine made from grapes.
-
We do not carbonate. It is a natural process, and takes up to two years to finish.
-
Will contain some sedimentation, due to the fact we never disgorge the bottles.
-
The carbon dioxide in the bottles occurs naturally as the Ancestral Method creates the sparkle.
-
Each bottle is a labour of love, crafted by hand and created for your enjoyment.
​
A tantalising taste for the conoissoeur of fine drinks
​
Our Sparkling Mead is completely natural, and we take great care to give you the very best. Honeybees collect nectar from flowering plants and transform it to honey.
Most honey in Australia is produced from the nectar of Eucalyptus trees. There are approximately 900 Eucalyptus species, mostly native to Australia and clearly identifying them can be a challenge, even for botanists. Different Eucalyptus species are sometimes known by the same English name in different regions of Australia and the naming of some of them has changed over the years.
​
The Bees...Honey bees play an essential role in agriculture, not only producing honey and beeswax but also pollinating a vast number of food crops. Our bees suffered during the 2020 bushfires and their numbers dwindled. We proudly source our honey from our local beekeepers who are sustainably sourcing their honey.
​
Eucalyptus melliodora, commonly known as yellow box, honey box or yellow ironbark,Yellow Box is a medium size tree, but can also reach a height of sixty meters and a stem diameter of over two meters at the base. The bark of the tree is outside brownish-grey, inside yellowish and it covers the greater part and sometimes the entire stem of the tree. There is, however, great variation in the appearance of the trunk and also the branches of individual trees. In some specimens the rough bark covers only a meter or two of the stem near the ground, the rest being smooth, while other trees sometimes growing nearby have the entire stem and the branches covered with rough bark.
​
Messmate is related to Stringy but is a different tree, flowers around Christmas time whereas Stringy Bark flowers in late Winter. The Messmate will grow on granite ridges, whereas Stringy Bark prefers deeper soils.
Mountain Gum (Eucalyptus globulus). This very tall tree species is found on margins of rainforests and in adjoining wet tall forests, where it grows to a height of more than 60m.
Our Method
Methode Champenoise Ancestrale
There are many ways to produce a sparkling wine. One of the most famous methods is perhaps the Traditional Method (or the Champagne Method). Then there is our method - when the term Ancestrale is added to this process you have a fermentation like no other. The Ancestrale Method dates back to 1531 and was created by the Benedictine monks of Saint-Hilarie, Languedoc. This is how Pierre crafts our fine Sparking Meads. So, what is it?
For this method - the first fermentation is not completely finished when the mead is bottled. It follows the carbon dioxide's that are produced by the honey's natural sugars. The complex sugars in the honey make the fermentation process a very slow one, rather than letting the yeast convert all the sugars of the honey into alcohol, then having to add a certain amount of unfermented brew at bottling time.
​
Our method is to monitor the specific gravity and bottle at the point where there is sufficient sugar left to continue the fermentation in the bottle and produce the natural sparkle and not have to artificially carbonate to make the sparkle. It is a slow process which takes up to 2 years to complete.
​
We leave the natural sediment in the bottle which continues fermenting and over all keeps improving over time, just like a good red wine. There will always be some cloudiness once poured into a glass.
​
Mixing of the unpasteurised honey which still has all the nutrients in it through to labelling is all done by hand.
​
According to the differences between honeys the character of the mead changes.
​
2 Wild Souls' range of Meads all retain the specific floral character of their original blossom making for extremely versatile pairing with many cuisines.
