Usually when something is ambitious, it has to also be good. Like if you throw on 1916 classic silent film, INTOLERANCE, as we do, you might be like “wow an entire set of a Babylon palace” while also saying “holy shit this movie sucks and is kinda…boring?”

Sometimes things are just ambitious, full stop. Zymarium runs at such a small scale that they can attempt weird things, fail, dust the Sauv Blanc pomace off of their Carhartt t shirts and keep on pressing those honeycombs.

Crucible of Worlds III was not delicious, not in the strictest sense. Maybe doing a 51% honey and 49% mead/wine hybrid is for the type of person whose favorite dish is Cioppino. I’m sure they exist but, do we really need to do all this to cater to those weirdos?

Take a musky funky Sancerre, and beat it up with Febreeze floral linen blasts. Then pump out the body of a usually svelte pouilly fuisse, and give it that flabby skinny fat aesthetic, tucking your lower “abs” into your leggings. It’s all honey knees and elbows.

If we view this as 49% wine, it is 49% a complete failure. If a Somm served you this bizarre fortified experiment, you would do that hemming and hawing windup to asking for “literally anything else im so sorry I never do this. House white even.” But because this is ostensibly a mead, it is judged within the framework of people who wear Warby Parkers and sigh loudly when you change the YouTube video they showed you too quickly. Finnicky sensitive cross body bag types. Scribbling away their Chardonnay affirmations before drinking a 32oz glass of water and intermittent fasting.

At a certain point you have to be successful enough to justify your eccentricities otherwise you’re just the friend people have to explain before you show up in a swoopy hat. This doesn’t justify all the bonkers madness it presents. It is both extremely dry but also with a creamy strange dustiness to it, like if you ate a Pineapple scented car air freshener. There’s probably no calories, but at what cost?