The Bay Crossings store will get a sweet addition in August. Fine varietal honeys, featuring some of Sonoma’s best, will be available for sale and free for tasting.
Published: August, 2005
The Bay Crossings store will get a sweet addition in August. Fine varietal honeys, featuring some of Sonoma’s best, will be available for sale and free for tasting.
Honey, like wine, reflects terroir (defined below) and beekeeping, via pollination, is essential to agriculture. Honey and beekeeping are important topics for the Bay Area, as a matter of aesthetics and business. Below, master beekeeper Serge LaBesque continues his rumination on matters bee and honey, as it relates to good taste and to distinct and lucrative agriculture.
"A terroir can definitely manifest itself in the products that are grown and harvested there. This is a well-known fact for wines, and it is undeniably true for honeys. Understand that honeybees do not produce honey. They collect nectars, which are sweet liquids exuded by flowers, and transform them into honey. Because different flowers produce nectars that have dissimilar odors and tastes, the honeys that result from the elaboration of these nectars are distinct from each other. Also, for a given species of flowers, the characteristics of the nectar produced are influenced by the soil, the local microclimate, the time of the year, the weather… There is a very direct connection between terroir and the appearance, taste and quality of local honeys.
Honey is sometimes labeled according to the dominant bloom that is found around the hives prior to its harvest. There are hundreds, even thousands of different types of honey: alfalfa, buckwheat, clover, orange blossom, sage, eucalyptus, lavender, thyme, yellow star thistle, to name but a few. Honeybees may at times fly as much as a couple of miles away from their hives in search of nectar. This represents a vast expanse of land that should be covered by a single type of blooming plant in order to associate its name with the honey that is harvested there.
Most often, bees combine nectars from a variety of floral sources. In such cases, whether these are cultivated or wild plant species, the honey is customarily labeled as wildflower honey. Another way of differentiating these non-varietal honeys is by the season when the nectars were collected, which leads to spring and summer wildflower honeys, for example.
The US Department of Agriculture has established and published standards, according to which many products, including honey, may be graded. Moisture content, color, and clarity of the honey are some of the major factors that are taken into consideration.
There are two important factors that are usually not addressed in labeling. These are the intrinsic quality and the wholesomeness of the honey. If the nectar sources, the area of origin and the season during which the honey was elaborated by bees are important, the equipment and methods used by the beekeeper to manage the hives, to harvest and bottle the honey are also determinant factors that influence the quality of the product. The USDA guidelines and current definition of organic honey are controversial and unfortunately do not represent a gauge of quality.
Small variations in the location of hives and the corresponding differences in microclimates may influence the color and taste of the honey they produce. This is particularly noticeable in natural settings, when the morphology of the land and the plants that grow there are varied. Two hives that are set side by side during a given period of time may produce two different looking and tasting honeys. When they are foraging, bees are faithful to a plant species as long as it is producing nectar and pollen. This is what makes them such efficient pollinators. So, for example, if the scout bees of a hive have guided their foragers to a stand of blackberry bushes while the bees of the other hive were gathering nectar from purple vetch, the resulting honeys differ. How could this be mapped other than according to general characteristics? It has to be experienced by tasting and enjoying the diversity of the honeys.
Aside from the possible exception of the honey that comes from almond orchards, any location in Northern California has the potential to produce delicious honeys. Some are light in color and subtly flavored, others are dark, almost black, with strong and robust tastes. In our area, the color of honey may be any shade of amber or yellow, and on occasions it even has hints of red or green. The consistency of honey may also vary from very liquid to thick. And since most of the types of honey we have here naturally crystallize in a rather short period of time, their texture may then become soft, butter-like, or very firm, with a granulation that may be anywhere from fine to coarse."
