Dancing Bee Winery
They ferment mead beside the hives that make the honey, and one of the bottles is a bochet, honey cooked to caramel before the yeast gets near it.2
Why go
The winery sits inside Walker Honey Farm, whose store sells the raw material by varietal: wildflower, orange blossom, mesquite and guayacan.3 That is why the list runs as wide as it does. Seven meads on the shelf at $20 to $22: Burn Pile Bochet, Cyser Apple Melomel, Blackberry Melomel, Logi's Libation, Texas Two-Step, a Dry Mead and a Traditional Sweet.2 A tasting is four pours and you can mix meads, meads on tap and wines across it.1 The charcuterie is put together in house, down to the honey mustard.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the Burn Pile Bochet, $22. Caramelized honey is a different animal from the sweet traditional, which they also bottle, and tasting the two against each other is the whole point of coming here.2
- Order: the Cyser Apple Melomel next to it, so you get the apple against the caramel.2
- Order: a tray with the farm-style honey mustard, which they make themselves.1
- Avoid: counting on food when a truck is parked up. The house sells the boards by special request on those days.1
Good to know
- Timing: Monday to Thursday 10am to 4.30pm, Friday and Saturday 9am to 5.30pm, Sunday noon to 5.30pm. It shuts on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, and on nothing else.1
- Seating: indoors, a covered patio, and an open pergola.1
- Buy honey on the way out. The farm shop runs from 2 oz jars to a gallon.3
Verdict
could-visit — Making mead beside the hives that produce the honey is the shortest supply chain in this batch, and the farm shop proves it by selling wildflower, mesquite, orange blossom and guayacan separately. A bochet on the list means somebody is caramelizing honey before fermentation, which is work, and a cyser means they are pressing apples into it. No outside assessment of the meads has been established, and a four-pour tasting on a US highway makes a good stop on a drive.