The Tasting Room here at St Ambrose is a great place to try out all of the innovative flavors and old favorites our wine and mead makers have been working so hard on for your enjoyment. Whether you’re new to our meadery, you’ve been here a time or two, or, you’re a seasoned pro to bellying up with us again, you’ll find the girls waiting to serve you a complimentary tasting selection of any six of our tasty libations. If you’re new to mead, come on in, and be sure to try a sample of our delicious Dancing Bare Ambrosia. Dancing Bare is a great “cross-over” to the mead side for white wine enthusiasts. A copious blend of white wine grapes and honey, fermented together, Dancing Bare Ambrosia is also known as a pyment.
What’s a Pyment?
A pyment refers to all the constituents of mead blended and then fermented with grapes or grape juice. A pyment can also be produced from sweetening a wine with honey or by mixing wine and mead after fermentation of each has been completed.
The goal of a pyment is to have a wine flavor with the soft honey finish of a mead, melding complexities for balance in sweetness, acidity and tannin. Any variety of grapes will work to produce a pyment, but we use wine grapes (as opposed to table grapes).
Each year, a grape variety will take on different aromas and flavors, depending upon the growing conditions during the growing season. Factors such as rainfall and temperature have the most significant impact. So, although you can find any number of descriptions of a grapes personal variety, the final qualities of each harvest will not always take on all of the descriptors. The flavor will tell you the story of the season with subtle nuances of flavor, aroma, texture.
The Dancing Bare Difference
Pyment can be made with just one type of grape or can include a blend of grapes or grape juice, depending on the desired characteristics. Our Dancing Bare Ambrosia utilizes the Cayuga and Seyval Blanc grapes, selected for the balance of acidity and sweetness inherent to these varietals. Using our own Star Thistle Honey from our Sleeping Bear Farms very busy bees, the final product is semi sweet with fruity notes, floral undertones, and a crisp finish.
Dancing Bare is at its peak of enjoyment on the porch swing in August or after a full moon skinny dip all summer long. We encourage you to open a bottle in June after you’ve picked up a pound of asparagus from the Harris Farm out on Indian Hill Road and fire up the grill for the ten-pound lake trout you caught the night before. By all means, it also pairs nicely with comfort food and a cozy fire in the midst of winter.
Look for the Bee Goddess label on the beautiful cobalt blue bottle on our shelves or at your favorite wine store. Let the nectar of the hive and the celebrated noble wines of Michigan make you a believer in “All You Mead Is Love”.