-- Pete Seeger

Some like it sweet. Others prefer it dry. And humans have liked it for thousands of years.

Now several local winemakers are bringing out of the shadows of obscurity this ancient beverage: honey wine, or mead.

In Ellsworth, winemaker Al Paterini added mead to his inventory of varietal and fruit wines soon after opening his winery in December 1996. He made his first acquaintance with the beverage during a visit to his sister in Washington, D.C., in 2000, when he attended a chicken barbecue where mead was the featured drink.

"I knew mead was made from honey but had never before tasted it," he said. "I ended up liking it so much I decided to make some myself when I got home."

With 40 pounds of honey purchased from a local beekeeper and a tried-and-true recipe he uses for making fruit wines, Mr. Paterini turned sweet honey mixed with water and premier cuvee yeast into honey-flavored wine.

He's made mead every year since and now has increased his annual output to 25 gallons, fermented in a stainless steel tank. His regular base of mead-drinking customers, some of whom purchase his honey wine by the case and half case, account for a large portion of his production, which usually is sold out by New Year's Day. Even with the current cost of honey on the rise, the winery still manages to sell its mead at $9 a bottle.

To ensure that his semisweet alcoholic beverage comes across with definite honey flavors, he uses no additional ingredients or seasonings. For the edification of his customers, he includes a short write-up on each of his bottle labels that explains some of the history of mead.

The concise narrative states that in Ireland, mead was believed to have the ability to increase virility and fertility, and it therefore became customary for a newlywed bride and groom to drink mead for one full moon cycle after their wedding. Hence the word honeymoon. In Ireland, the tradition of toasting a bride and groom with mead as they depart on their honeymoon carries on to this day.

Mead was popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, and in ancient Greece. The first known written description of this heady drink is found in the Rigveda, the sacred Hindu text of about 1,500 B.C.

"Right now, my 2008 release is still aging, because I like to give it time," said Mr. Paterini. "It's clear, sparkling and bright and should be ready in a few weeks."

Look for a release date somewhere around the first week of September. The winery is at 21 Hemlock St., Ellsworth. Phone 724-239-4656 for directions and hours of operation.

Fewer than 15 miles away on U.S. Route 40 near Malden, Washington County, Joe Skocik, owner of Plum Run Winery, added mead to his lengthy list of fruit and grape wines five years ago.

"One day an older lady about 75 to 80 years old came into my tasting room and asked if I ever made mead," he said. "When I said no, she brought some in with her on her next visit. It was very sweet, and I decided to make some of my own."

Mr. Skocik's mead is made from clover honey bought from two or three local beekeepers and is a lot less sweet than the one he first tried. He also makes a blackberry "melomel" (mead with fruit) by fermenting honey with blackberries and labels Berry Mead Mylomyl. Both the mead and melomel sell for $18 a 750-millimeter bottle.

"It's a real art making mead, because you have to make a judgment about how much water to add to get the alcohol level right," he said. "And you have to add things grapes have that honey doesn't, such as peptic enzyme, tannin, acid blend and yeast nutrient.

"Mead's a good seller for me because it's getting to be a better-known beverage," added Mr. Skocik, who bottled 35 gallons of the golden-hued wine this year.

Plum Run Winery is at 540 National Pike West (Route 40), Malden, near Beallsville. Phone 724-632-3147 for directions and hours.

In Greene County, Leigh and Lillian Shields are relative newcomers to the world of mead production. Their place is best known as Shields Herb and Flower Farm for its wide range of herbs, flowers, shrubs, water plants and dried flower arrangements. But in January the couple opened Shields Demense Winery with nine kinds of melomel, all made from honey and grapes.

One of the nursery's greenhouses now holds 50 50-gallon barrels of different melomels, which Mr. Shields said can be fermented in a hot environment and seem to benefit from the greenhouse's high humidity.

"There's a side benefit to the carbon dioxide the fermenting yeasts give off," he said. "The hanging baskets of scented geraniums and citrus and bay trees we bring in during the winter seem to thrive in the CO2-rich atmosphere."

He learned to make melomel from an experienced fermenter, Ferenc Androczi, owner of the Little Hungary Farm Winery in Buckhannon, W.Va. Mr. Shields was a frequent visitor to the winery and helped Mr. Androczi prune his vines, pick his grapes and make the melomel.

In the future, Mr. Shields may even have more help from his son, Alexander, 20, who's studying biology at Penn State and hopes eventually to go on for a master's degree in oenology. He already helps out at the winery and prints the winery's melomel labels from the family computer.

Mr. Shields buys his honey (about 5,000 pounds ) from ThistleDew Farm in Proctor, W.Va., and from a co-op in Lancaster County.

His grapes (and grape juice) come from Erie, and honey and grapes are turned into nine types of melomel with flavors and names such as Honeysuckle Rose, Roberts Run White, Bloodroot, Primavera and Medovina.

"I don't add sulfites to my wine, which means that people who get headaches from sulfites can drink my wines," he said.

As yet, the winery hasn't advertised its product other than in a newsletter that goes out to the Shields' customers.

All of Shields Demense Winery melomels sell for $10 a bottle, a reasonable price when you consider that honey is more expensive than wine grapes or juice. All of the melomels are available for tasting and purchase in the tasting room adjacent to the farm gift shop.

Shields Demense Winery is at 374 Smith Creek Road (state Route 218), south of Spraggs. For directions and hours of operation, phone 724-435-7246.