There's a lot of reasons why mead hasn't hit mainstream yet -- a major one is that the commercial production of mead is a developing industry, relatively new on the scene. I have a copy of the late Dr. Roger Morse's Master's Thesis, University of Cornell 1953 and according to his research at the time, much of the commercial production of mead was for Jewish sacramental purposes. That may not be totally accurate, but it does show that mead had a very limited market niche at the time.
The Meadery at Greenwich, now known as Betterbee Meadery, may have been the first facility devoted to mead production alone -- it was founded some time in the 1980s. More followed, but you can see that this wasn't so very long ago.
Academic research into the science of honey fermentation and commercial production of mead has been limited. The main center seems to have been the University of Cornell, championed by Roger Morse and Robert Kime, both of whom have passed away.
Some good lessons for promoting mead can be picked up from the history of winemaking in the US. There were a number of important changes and innovations made that pushed US wine to world class status. Some, using the name of the varietal grape on the labels, making strides to produce a "food wine" rather than the simple jug wines that had been prevalent on the market, or the links between wine and cuisine, wine and the table.
Some time ago, I ran a survey of commercial meadmaking in the US, for the then International Mead Association. Many meaderies were reluctant to release their yearly production figures so part of the conditions for the survey was that I would not publish any individual figures, only general sums and generalizations so as to give an idea of what mead production was like in the US. I still have all the returned survey forms and I'm staying true to my promise, but I think I can say this. Whatever you might think of Chauer's Mead, Bargetto Winery is doing something right. Their figures were well above everyone else, at the time I did the survey.
Many of the advances in awareness of mead, the promotion of mead, have been done by every day folk. The most successful mead assocition was the American Mead Association, founded by Pamela Spence. The Mazer Cup, same thing, started by Ken Schramm and Dan McConnell, it became *the* mead competition to enter. Everyone had been saying that a new mead book was needed for quite a few years, it happened with Ken Schramm's "Compleat Meadmaker" but Ken did this as something on the side, along with his regular job, family life, orchard care, fly fishing, and everything else he does. ;D Of course, there's Vickie Rowe and her venture into a web site just for the fun of it, at first ;D , and Oskaar's contributions to the site, and what they've both done in keeping the Boulder Colorado mead competition going, now the Mazer Cup International competition.
Historical background in the production of mead. There's a lot of room for improvement here. The honeymoon story about mead isn't true, yet it still turns up on a lot of mead promotion efforts. Mead has an international culture yet too much of the commercial promotion of mead focuses too much on Nordic folk. Eastern Europe and mead culture -- it's huge. Same thing with Africa. Brittany France -- I've been told that mead in Brittany is as common on grocery shelves as wine.
Phil Dunlap, who pens the cartoon strip Ink Pen, had some fun with commercial meadmaking and in the process poked a little fun at both Ken Schramm and myself (you have to read between the lines to catch it), pretty funny stuff but he had some good critiques on mead that are worth looking at. Go here:
http://www.gocomics.com/inkpen/
Click on the calendar to go to the first strip in the thread, starting March 17, 2008 (St. Patrick's Day!).
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