To ship in Jan, 2013
250 ml(8.5 oz) - Italy

With a lovely aroma that hints of the honey from which it was made, this is one delightful vinegar. Light in body but full of bright flavors and a hint of residual sweetness that softens the finish making it seem less acidic than its 6% indicates. I like to think of it as an improvement over Banyuls vinegar. It has more flavor and body than Banyuls and it's softer. This makes it a perfect alternative to both Banyuls and Sherry vinegars.

Hydromiele (hydromel) is probably the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man. The simple mixture of honey and water, accidentally forgotten, ferments into a delicious alcoholic beverage. Eventually known as mead in much of northern Europe it was probably the easiest to make. Leave this beverage alone long enough and like all alcoholic beverage open to the air it will be a feast for wild acetobacter, the microscopic critters that convert alcohol to acid.

Guiseppe Cagnoni has taken stock of this ancient method to create one of the most flavorful and versatile vinegars that we've ever tasted. He mixes his organic Millefiori honey with water and cooks it down to the desired consistency and then allows it to alcoholically ferment into hydromiele, a process that takes from 1 to 1-1/2 months. The hydromeile is then diluted with more watrer and exposed it to the open air for over a month to allow the concentrated vinegar "mother" to develop. This culture is added to a larger volume of hydromiele in steel tanks to acidicly ferment for 4 to 5 months until it turns to vinegar. Each year the process is begun again, from scratch, the result is a new set of flavors that represent the honey produced that season. And, oh what a vinegar!

ingredients: Water, wildflower honey
acidity: 5%