Here in the savage urban jungle of Toronto it’s damnably difficult to find commercial meads — one of the things that inspired us to start brewing our own in fact.  There are a couple that are available on a semi-regular basis, but as we are about to see, they are not really representative.

Rossignol Estate winery is based in Prince Edward Island and offers a blackberry mead as one of their regular products.  Admirable, yes, but it all falls down in the marketing.  It comes in a tall thin bottle that immediately harkens to ice wine and desert wine, which is their target.

I have nothing against flavored meads, but when it comes right down to it, if one is buying mead one expects to at least have it taste a bit like mead.  This blackberry mead is not mead that has been infused with blackberries, it is blackberry juice with some mead in it.  If it were presented to me as a blackberry dessert wine I would have appreciated it on that level, and as such it is quite tasty.  It is very fresh and full, and the blackberry notes are clearly not artificial — but it’s not mead.  While a fine product on it’s own, I suspect they ended up using the word “mead” at all because “Blackberry/Honey Wine” just looks awkward.

In the end if you’re looking for a fruit wine with a tiny bit of honey notes in the finish, this is an excellent choice.  If you’re looking for a flavored mead, I’m afraid you should keep looking.