Into the spirits

Part 4

by Mary Hurley

Photos by Paul Moreau Jr.

If location is one of Nashoba's chief assets, the opposite is true for As You Like It. Four members of a New Age Maitreyan order, opened the bakery in downtown Fitchburg 12 years ago. The winery was added in 1993. They chose Fitchburg because it was the largest commercial center near Ashby, where members of the order live, commune-style. But Fitchburg's decline has hurt sales for the winery/bakery, says Jerry C. Welch, one of the owners and the general manager (He is better-known around town by his New Age name, Khiron).

"Our income has dropped 50 percent in the last five years," he says "We attempt to provide a world-class product for a mill town -- that is a slight mistake," he says. In other areas of the country, it is not unusual to pay $24 for a bottle of mead, he says. "We are lucky to get $7.50.

The order, in fact, is planning to shutter its Fitchburg operation and relocate to Ashby in the next two to three years.

Khiron may be down on Fitchburg, but he is high on mead wine.

Mead wine is an medieval wine made with honey and favored by Europeans in the pre-Roman era. Khiron blames the Romans for the start of mead's decline. They introduced what he calls the "modern" version of wine, made with sugar and grapes. In Europe, mead is still the drink of the banquet, he says. Tourists in Ireland who visit a medieval castle and partake of the traditional banquet are served mead.

As You Like It sells two varieties of mead wine: Orange Blossom and Ginger. The Orange Blossom, for example, is made with honey, a blend of three fruit acids and champagne yeast. Aficionados claim the Orange Blossom wine is an aphrodisiac (it is not a proven claim, but if it helps, hey, go for it). Orange Blossoms, after all, have been bridal petals since ancient times, symbols of fertility. Mead was viewed as the drink of love. The word honeymoon, Khiron points out, stems from the traditional wedding-day gift of mead wine.

Even if the wine doesn't make you go wild, it will deliver a kick. "It's celebratory. As joyous as champagne," Khiron says of both his ginger and orange blossom wine. And with less aftereffects. There's less chance of hangover headache, for instance. "It has a unique richness and spice of flavor," he says of both his wines. He's right.

"Pure accident" is how he describes his affair with mead. Khiron first sampled the wine when he was stationed in Europe with the US Army in the late '60s and early '70s." It changed my whole outlook. It was the last day I purchased a grape wine." After several careers and nearly two decades later, he decided to make the stuff himself. He studies European brewing manuals and then experimented for a full year. It was definitely trial and error, but the creative process appealed to him. "It's an extremely demanding science," he says.

"We are unique in America. We make a very dry mead, and most are sweet," he says. According to Khiron, As You Like It is one of 14 wineries in the US that makes mead wine.

The front of the store looks like an ordinary bakery. In a glass case is a tempting array of baked goods, including German-style sourdough bread and "czechos," a butter cookie filled with raspberry jam, plus muffins, cookies, and scones. "Everything is made by us, from scratch," Khiron says. But, unusual for a bakery, there is a rack of wine on the left. Customers are asked if they would like a taste.

The mead is made -- brewed and fermented, to be precise -- in the back rooms. Both varieties are brewed by formulas developed by Khiron. Back-room shelves are lined with seven-gallon glass jugs called "carboys" and enclosed in brown plastic trash containers. After three months to a year in the carboys containers, the wine is siphoned off into a six-gallon containers. "Glass can be tricky," he says. "It automatically limits you to small batches. . . . We don't use wood, it interferes with the purity of wine."

The winery's yearly output is small, about 500 gallons, Khiron says, but adds, "we are growing and growing every year." The wine is available only in Fitchburg, and there's a reason for that. To distribute alcoholic beverages, the state requires a separate transportation license for an approved vehicle. The business is not large enough to support the hiring of a wholesale distributor. As an individual, "I can't ship it, I can't use UPS, I can't mail it," he says. To Federal Express two bottle of wine to Boston, for example, would cost "four times" the cost of the wine, he says.

A majority of the customers are not local, but from Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island. There are more customers from Hartford than Boston, he notes. "Bostonians will not leave their city. They think trolls live in the woods around here," he says.

They don't know what they're missing. The favored cocktail at the Ashby commune is one-part mead wine mixed with three-parts tonic water. "We sit around all evening drinking this and we are just the happiest people in the universe," he says.

See Wine for the road