I'll let the beermakers chime in on the beer comapraison as I've only dabbled with beers so far, but as far as my experiences and reading have indicated, the procedure for making mead is more closely related to winemaking than beermaking.
I started with winemaking eight years ago (mostly fruit wines rather than grape wines, so like the article says, nobody knows what it's supposed to taste like because nobody else really does it, and it's harder to get information because most research has been done with grape must.
For this reason, I've always tried to make my fruit wines match a grape must in acidity, tannin, nitrogen and sugar content. I used to also do this with my meads, until I came here.
On Gotmead, I learned that honey has its own acidity which can mess with your must's pH, especially since honey (unlike fruit) has no buffering capacity (ability to maintain a relatively steady pH despite unstable conditions like fermentation that may be trying to affect the pH).
This is the first part where I disagree with this article, you DO need to worry about your pH with meads, perhaps even moreso than wines, as excessive acidity/low pH can cause your yeast to make off-flavours or odours or to stop working altogether.
The second part I potentially disagree with is regarding the lack of sulphur in honey... I'm pretty sure I've read reports of sulphorous emissions from traditional meads, I could be wrong as I've not done enough traditionals to have my own anecdotal evidence, but underfed or stressed yeast will usually find a way to make stink...
The third part I disagree with is the supposed lack of milestones. Look around here, you'll find them to be similar to winemaking milestones. You usually want to start in the same neighbourhood as wine when it comes to initial specific gravity. You want to aerate and add nutrients to your must before 1/3 of the fermentation has progressed (look up 1/3 sugar break). You want to rack it out of your primary vessel and into a vessel which will limit its headspace when the specific gravity hits 1.000 or stops changing, and you want to keep checking the SG to make sure it's not still changing when you bottle it, or else you get bottle bombs.
And if it's taste milestones they mean? Well, you don't want the alcohol to taste so strongly that you think you're drinking rocket fuel, you don't want to taste or smell off-flavours that can develop under certain circumstancs, you want the acidity and sweetness to balance each other, you want some body or mouthfeel to it so it feels thicker than water... in short you don't want any of the things in your mead that would render a wine to be flawed...
This article also doesn't mention oxidation. Beers are very susceptible to oxidation, wines less so, and meads even less so than wines.
but just for the purposes of interest I thought I'd paste it here because I thought it was quite interesting.
