By Jules Polonetsky

Loew Vineyards in Mount Airy has released Mechaya, the first Star-K-certified honey wine produced in Maryland, and the name is fitting. In Yiddish, a mechaya is a relief, a delight, the thing you say out loud after the first sip on a hot afternoon. In Hebrew the root means to give life. Both meanings apply here, because what is being released is not only a beverage category but a new step for a family business that the Holocaust interrupted.

The Löw family made honey wine in Galicia, first in Bursztyn and later in Lemberg, the city we know as Lwów and today as Lviv. They shipped it across Europe. Mead in that part of the world was as Polish as it was Jewish, and a great many of the meaderies and distilleries in the region were in Jewish hands. The region in general is too cold to grow most wine grapes. The business ran until the war ended it. Decades later, Bill Loew, an engineer who had survived and rebuilt a life in the United States, bought 37 acres on Liberty Road in Frederick County with his wife Lois and started planting in 1982. Their granddaughter Rachel Loew Lipman is now the fifth generation to make wine under the family name, and she runs the winery with her partner, Sam Adler.

Rachel has spent years reconstructing what her ancestors actually did. One artifact survived the century: a copy of an early bottle label. The new Mechaya label is built around it, honoring the original Löw label from 1870.

What is in the bottle

Mechaya is a cyser, the traditional term for a mead fermented with apple. Rachel blends local apple cider with wildflower and clover honey, and ferments it dry. If you are picturing the sticky, syrupy mead of a Renaissance fair, put that image away. This is bright and citrusy, closer in spirit to a Sauvignon Blanc, minus the grapes. The honey shows up as aroma and texture rather than as sugar. Fermenting a honey wine all the way dry is harder than it sounds, since honey ferments slowly and stubbornly, and the reward is a wine with acidity and lift instead of weight.

That dryness is what makes it useful at the table rather than at dessert. Serve it well chilled as an aperitif when guests walk in. It handles gefilte fish far better than most whites do, since the citrus cuts the sweetness of the fish without fighting the horseradish. It is very good with roast chicken and with anything involving apples, which is quite timely for Rosh Hashanah. At a dairy meal it works beautifully with goat cheese and with a salad carrying fruit and nuts. This is decidedly not a sweet dessert wine.

Loew also released this year’s jars of honey, harvested from the property. If you are assembling a Rosh Hashanah gift for a host or an office, honey from the same farm as the honey wine is a hard combination to beat.

How honey wine gets made

Wine and mead are both fermented sugar, and after that they part company. A grape arrives at the winery as a complete package. It brings sugar, acid, water, tannin, aromatics and the nitrogen the yeast needs to eat, all in roughly the proportions fermentation wants. The winemaker’s job is largely one of choices and restraint.

Honey brings sugar and very little else. Straight honey is actually hostile to yeast, so the first step is dilution, with water in a classic mead and here with apple cider. Honey carries almost no nitrogen, so the meadmaker feeds the yeast in measured doses across the fermentation. Honey is also low in acid, so acidity has to be built rather than inherited. There are no skins and no seeds, which means no tannin and no color, and structure has to come from acid and from whatever fruit is blended in.

The pace is different too. A grape fermentation is often finished inside two weeks. A mead can grind along for a month or more, and the delicate floral aromatics that make honey worth fermenting are exactly the compounds a hot, fast fermentation drives off, so the work is done cool and slow.

The vocabulary follows the blend. Honey with apple is a cyser, which is what Mechaya is. Honey with grape juice is a pyment. Honey with other fruit is a melomel. And the analog of grape variety is the flower the bees worked, which is why a wildflower and clover blend tastes nothing like buckwheat or orange blossom. Terroir here is a question of what was in bloom.

The hechsher

Loew Vineyards made news recently when it began to produce some of its grape wines under a Conservative supervision, and it continues to produce a range of reds and wines for the general market. Check loewvineyards.com for the options and certifications and consider ordering in time for Rosh Hashanah which begins the evening of Friday, Sept. 11 this year.

Traditionalists won’t make kiddush on a non-grape wine, but many will use such a beverage for Havdalah. You can also make reservations to visit the winery and taste the wines firsthand.

The release party

Loew marked the release on Sunday, Aug. 9 at the winery, 14001 Liberty Road, Mount Airy. Guests enjoyed a glass of Mechaya along with a slice of kosher pizza, and there was music and a short dedication to toast the new bottling. “I love the history of the winery, and I’m personally connected to it as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors,” said guest Heidi Wachs. I love what Rachel has done to take on and expand her grandfather’s vision. I am a member of the wine club because the wines are delicious and I get a great variety four times a year.”

Mechaya can be ordered now, and it will stay available for online sales and at the winery tasting room. Mount Airy sits about an hour from Washington and Baltimore and a bit over two from Philadelphia. The Frederick County countryside in August was worth the drive on its own, as was standing in a tasting room where a family that lost everything in Europe is pouring the same drink their ancestors sold in Lemberg, under a label they used in 1870, with a Baltimore hechsher on the back. There are worse ways to start the month of Elul. Order Mechaya at bit.ly/star-kmechaya or schedule a tasting at the winery.

L’Chayim!

Jules Polonetsky is a Wine and Spirits Education Trust Level 3 certified wine expert who edits a wine education website at kosher-wine.org. He is a former consumers affairs commissioner for New York City.