Mead, Wine, & Liqueur Labels

My father, is an astute and talented liqueur and Meade-maker and I have made quite a few labels for his hobby, which you’ll see here below.   I have also followed in his footsteps, refining his recipes and making many of my own. 

Dr. Ladislav J. Haňka, is a retiree now, but for decades labored as a microbiologist and biochemist at The Upjohn company in Kalamazoo, conducting basic research in the development of new pharmaceuticals.  He specialized in examining the world of nature for soil  fungi and all else that might create naturally produced and highly complex biochemical compounds with potential for medicinal uses.  He was among the early developers of a field that has come to be known as Pharmacognacy and particularly known among colleagues for having evolved screening procedures to assay massive numbers of soil samples to find useful micro-organisms.  And in those soil samples  from around the world  he did indeed discovere soil metabolites that led to the evolution of the very earliest epigenetic drugs,  which of course,  have become so important in modern medicine. 

My parents were both refugees from postwar Czechoslovakia.  After having made it through Nazi occupation a little shell-shocked and edgy but intact, they found the workers paradise of the subsequent Stalinist regime all too much.  They emigrated in 1950 to Iowa, but  by way of a displaced persons camp in Nurnberg Germany and a subsequent pockmarked shot up flat in Frankfurt.  They shipped out through Bremerhafen on the USS Hershey, a bomb-scarred navy ship  that sunk a few months later. After a storm-tossed mid-November north Atlantic passage they were greeted In New York harbor by the salvation army, bearing donuts and coffee and they said to themselves, ‘now this s a civil way to greet a person and place we can live’.

It is said, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger ‘.   My folks must have been strong as bulls in rut by about that time.  They hit the American soil running, got to Iowa, found jobs, had some kids and partook of American higher education - in a foreign language. Eventually they found their way to Michigan -  a place with lots of water full of fish – and Kalamazoo,  a hospitable town with a lively culture,  worthy of putting down roots.  They are still in the same house with the same phone number,  fifty-eight years later. 

Thinking as an occasional  brewer of beer and a bee-keeper, I must compliment my pappy on never having lost sight of his own progenitors and having honored  his spiritual fore-fathers by being himself a wine and mead-maker.  It was after all, the makers of beer, wine and bread who first learned to look at soil samples  as well as the leaves of wild grapes and hops for the finer yeasts that impart just the right flavors to their finished products.  Father also kept his hand in that mythic ancestral heart-land of modern medicine by indulging in fermentations that weren’t measured in hecto-liters and which didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to run.  He made his domestic batches of Meade at a very modest human scale and has done so well - for all his days, which at 95, the Gods clearly deigned to give him in copious measure.  

Father’s meads stood head and shoulders above all the others and were much akin to the finest of light sherries rather than the syrupy stuff that often passes for Mead or the frou-frou flavored beverages that are so often pastiches of too, too strong unbalanced flavors that  just assault us with every taste on a chemists shelf.  Why cover up the origins of honey that has come from local sources with tastes as subtle and nuanced as any French wine – indeed,  as meadow in bloom?  Why indeed!  Sometimes  father’s meads are a little effervescent and delicately carbonated but always light and delicate –  redolent of the wax and pollen and little bee dramas that went into their making .  And they get better with age.  A twenty year old Meade brought up from the cellar for a wedding is a rare treat indeed.

My own nod to father’s libations were to take up his practice of making liqueurs.  I have found that I have a bit of a knack for that and of course I make labels for us both.

With this ‘Witches Brew’, I must admit that I take a certain pride in my own  variety of hacking skills and in having cracked the code  of Omerta  - of recipe silence – and made something almost indiscernible from the original La Strega recipe.  It was a late night effort with neighbor Gary Miron (Herr DR Charter School investigator) and Gustav Liedberg, his Swedish physician father-in-law –  mixing herbs and tinctures.  We were there solving the ills of society, smoking cigars and testing and tasting little vials and bottles of slowly decocting and infusing seeds, roots, rhizomes and rinds until we got it right – or nearly so –  landed close enough.   Now there’s an example of putting that degree and his pharmacological skills to good use, instead of just taking pills out of big bottles and putting them into small bottles!  Filling prescriptions yes, but what prescriptions those can be.

Actually I tend to bypass doctors and go straight to pharmacists. They often seem to know more, are available when you need them , take some time to talk to you, exhibit patience with questions, stop and look up side effects and synergistic mechanisms of action and charge far less.  And there’s nothing quite like the sparkle in the eye of on old time pharmacist when you ask him for  Glauber Salts or need to have him make you a salve of some kind from scratch.

“Right you are feller.  Let’s roll up our sleeves and get this puppy made up.  What do the kids know, eh?’

Many moons ago I discovered that the volatile aromatic oils contained in Sassafras are easily extracted into vodka and that the taste left on the tongue has the feel of being substantially higher in alcohol content than it actually is and stays with one in a most endearing and pleasurable way.  Sassafras is among the most common of hedgerow trees here in Michigan and there’s no harm in thinning them out - even a lot. It does however, take some doing to dig the roots out of  tangle of blackberry, locust,  greenbriar and Poison ivy in a Michigan fencerow.  And so my little monkey brain never quite let go of that, until I discovered to my delight that Sassafras is an early pioneer species in sand dunes and has a way of sending out absolutely wondrous clean thin lengths of rope-like runners just under the surface of the sand dunes to new open sunny areas which the plant wishes to exploit.  One can just waltz right up and pull up a smallish looking Sassafras sapling and then just keeping on pulling the runner roots for yards and yards,  following them out to wherever they take you.  Coil up those lengths of Sassafras rope into convenient lariats and you can be on your way in no time.

Back home and experimenting with my newfound wealth of raw materials, I found the resulting tincture to be powerful stuff that seemed to benefit from some sweetening, but it also has a root beer/ soda-pop – even medicinal cough syrup quality about it that I didn’t much care for.  It was too simple. Not an adult taste.  Once I started making it more complex, with some earthy undertones, things got a lot more interesting - Dandelion root, Nettle root, fennel seed and Anise go well with Sassafras.   I won’t be surprised if some peppermint wouldn’t be a subtle lingering taste that might do well in the combination - maybe even some mushrooms.   Next summer’s herb-gathering trips will have to include Peppermint alongside the usual Saint John’s Wort & Yarrow collecting and of course Sassafras patch vandalizing. 

Here is a dragon fly on a dried fall fern, well on its way to becoming a Vignoles - well, maybe a label on a Vignoles  –  at our own local Lawton Ridge Winery.  I suppose you never really know what gets mashed up and fermented and gives a late fall wine its particularly distinctive and subtle sought-after flavors – perhaps it’s the ferns or the bugs, maybe it’s the bacteria and sweat from the firm shapely young legs of the ladies out stomping the grapes in those capacious vats laughing it up and making it a party which imparts such a good feel to the wine.   It’s a nice thought - eh?  Perhaps it still happens that way at some Bacchanal in Sicily or Greece.

Dean Bender presides over the small winery and takes pride in that intimate hands-on approach after a day of hands-on bone straightening at his chiropractic office.  I can understand the attraction of vines that don’t suffer sciatica – or talk back.

Working on commissions  to meet the expectations of another is always precarious, but it can be rewarding as well.  Here however, is an image that nearly missed the mark.  Dean wanted something that says;  ‘this is a late-season wine, exquisite when it works out and the stuff to enter into competitions, but also a piece of heart-rending brinkmanship to create.’

Harvested after all else is safely in,  a vignole is more like an Eiswein or a Spätläse  – a specialty wine whose grapes are at risk of rotting and falling off the vine as inclement  weather threatens to come any day.  The vintner is biting his nails,  eying the pistol on the table and the banker’s note beneath it, as he watches the increasing losses and does a running mental calculus metering the increasing value of that continually diminishing harvest of surviving grapes growing in that immeasurable something that constitutes quality of the first degree.   When has it been long enough to be as good as it will ever get – and when do you go to work, while there’s still something on the vines left to be harvested?

I  kept looking at those characteristic Michigan  leaves that we all know - that speak to the heart, that are simple - obvious at a glance and the last vestiges of summer, on their way to becoming last summer’s memories: like a last dragonfly nearly frozen but barely hanging on,  a brittle ornament.  I knew the piece was good, but somehow ended up forcing it on Dean, who just wasn’t convinced.  To be fair, it’s a personal matter and there are no standards - just those of us with a track record or some pretensions to having good taste – who do, or don’t agree.  This etching sat on a back burner for several years until Dean warmed up to it and really began to see it without the need to necessarily have a depiction of what a Vignole really is.  What is after all the pictorial difference between a Vignole, a Cabernet or a Sherry?   I’ll tell you;  They’re all made from grapes that look a lot alike - but it’s the associations we have with them that I,  as an artist, must  somehow mysteriously reach into my eternally flexible bag of tricks and somehow  elicit and fabricate a convincing label.

Scrjabin wrote music based in synesthesia and I love the idea of tasting notes and arpeggios or hearing colors, but I must also confess that I do not see shapes and dragonflies in a bottle of wine.  I do, however,  have associations with a time of year and a feeling when imbibing – and of course the  free associations and visions that spontaneously arise at the end of the day when the body relaxes and the mind becomes a blank canvas going into reverie.  You take a sip and inhale the aromas, breath deeply and exhale.  You look out the window at the falling colored leaves and reflect on the comforting periodicity of it all –  the progression of  seasons and all else organic that a good wine elicits when we relax into it.  It’s fall. The harvest is in.  Dustings of snow are beginning to blow in suggestive ways.  We put up some fruits from the summer, chopped firewood, took out the skis and all is good. The wine isn’t just oaky or round or whatever the wine snobs tell us.  It’s even the dirt and the funky mildews and all the sensual free associations that spin off in ways that do not happen tomorrow, but right now and unmediated as the cork comes out and we are in the moment with all those subtle aromas enveloping us. If a nearly frozen last dragonfly or the smell of a crushed Bracken fern underfoot come to mind in that moment – what could be better?

But lets get back to Dady’s liqueurs - right?   Here below is the  secret  and closely guarded recipe for Daddy’s (and now mine) Karlsbad Bitters.   Apparently the recipe for Becher stomach bitters, widely sold from Karolvy Vary is a traditional old time Czech folk remedy and though today it is widely referred to as the thirteenth healing hot-spring of the spas there - it’s use goes way back into folk medicine.   Since the good old days when everybody made their own digestive liqueurs and ‘reheumatiz medicine’ for home use, that over-rated  commercialized variant has become widely sold and even exported worldwide in a patented and easily recognized green bottle.  This has of course led to the inevitable short-cuts and cheapening of production.  Expensive and hard to acquire herbs have slowly dropped out, as sugar content has been dramatically raised and aging reduced pretty much to the hours  spent awaiting inspection at the customs office at Long Beach or Norfolk or wherever it is that longshoremen sit by and watch as  they drum their fingers and customs agents pretend to look and  sign off on the goods. 

The recipe I use, made it’s way to us through my grand-mother,  living back then in Dobříš which is just south of Prague and that folksy recipe began with the useful information from back in the imperial Austro-hungarian monarchic days;   “Go to Pazdera’s pharmacy and purchase  Chamomile” and so forth....  My father, the chemist, got very precise down to the fraction of a gram, about how much of anything to put in the solution and then was too impatient for the results to really let it extract for more than a couple of days. I find that extraction over the course a few weeks vastly improves the resulting tincture - especially the bittering components and those are the ones I now value most.  I must admit I have added a pinch of Centuary and introduced Wormwood as well to achieve those desired ends as a true digestive.

Pappy wasn’t so keen on the over-sweetened original recipes and took the sugar down a notch.  I think he was right and now put in about a third of what even he was using and it seems better yet.   I have tried it completely unsweetened and that wasn’t quite right either.  Sugar seems to bring out a lot of the herbal flavors.  It just needs to be judiciously balanced.   This tincture now feels like a fine liqueur that has re-established its rightful place in our pharmacopeia as well as the liquor cabinet.  People to whom I give a bottle now report that it does indeed function to settle an upset stomach and has again the original intended function of being a truly efficacious digestive that also is a delight to sip and and savor.

Below you’ll find my own favorite recipe for a nice absinthe,  one which  has come down to me through a similarly long concatenation of unlikely yet fortuitous events.  Using all natural ingredients one does not achieve the nearly venomous looking green colors of a commercially produced absinthe, but it is interesting that the tincture does become wildly beautifully green for a few weeks in everclear (95% ethanol) .  That attractive and nearly psychedelic color is immediately lost when diluted with water - which of course is necessary before letting it come in contact with our own human mucosas.    I am guessing that there was a time when absinthe was served bright green for its beauty and then diluted to a milky solution with 50% or more water at the table, but that places where alcohol is served are not necessarily conducive to wise behaviors and people were periodically blasting their gizzards with 95% solutions –  with predictably disastrous results.  That would have  led to green coloring agents  supplanting what had once been the natural form of the substance...and the maintenance of the tradition for making it milky with a spoonful of cold water being preserved as a tradition to this day... .a good story in any case and perhaps true... 

Mister Bělohoubek (white mushroom in Czech) gave us this stomach liqueur but I no longer know who he might have been.  His place in posterity is however preserved here where he might have least expected it - on a website in North America  for his pharmacist’s  inventiveness sometime long before the first world war, before there was a Czechoslovakia, before the Archeduke Ferdinand got off at the wrong spot and met with Gavril Princip and his band of anarchist  Serbian anarchists - perhaps before there was a Franco-Prussian war or even and Austrian Prussian war and his ancestors were learning first hand the downside of being technologically behind the times on stuff like breach-loading munitions.  Maybe we even go back to Napoleon  - wouldn’t that be cool - back to Austerlitz  (which we call Slavkov),  when things again went badly for the inbred cretins that constituted the vast bulk of the the upper echelons of Austrian officer corps.   Napoleon claimed that one must count on the idiocy of the Austrian generals as a millitary fact.  Do not assume they will behave rationally or in their own best interests.   So then here we are all the way to  the early 18th century and tactics of war all over an absinthe recipe and you must be wondering how I will extricate myself from this mess – and I for my part, assure you it will be honorably and by way of the subject at hand - it will be through booze - of course.   My own brother in law - Slavek from Slavkov  has a plum orchard on the south facing slopes at Austerlitz where the blood of all those soldiers and the sun that shows no favoritism reaches deep into the soil to make the conditions that result in harvests of the most perfect plums and thus the most exquisite Slivovice the world has seen.... and all can indeed become blessed once again.