A pot of good honey is one of a kind, reflecting the different nectars that the local bees find within three miles of the hive. As such, the range can be extraordinary. In Italy, a nation that produces some of the most exquisite honeys in the world, the varieties stretch from gentle acacia to chocolatey carob and on to the bitter arbutus and chestnut honeys. These are known as monoflorals, made when beekeepers put their hives close to a particular plant in the hope of capturing a specific and distinctive taste.
Italy’s wide range of high-quality honeys — a happy result of climate, countryside and strong horticulture — has led to the country developing a trained method of tasting. Just as wine experts can taste grape varieties, honey tasters are taught to distinguish and remember different flavours and nectar sources. Does a jar of monofloral honey contain what it says on the label, for example, or is it significantly altered by large quantities of other types of nectar?
At short but intense courses in honey sensory analysis, beekeepers and others — students, chefs, food experts — learn how to look, sniff, taste and discern. The main aim is to help beekeepers develop a better understanding of their own honeys, but trained tasters also use their skills as buyers or as judges in honey shows.
There are all the honeys that come from many flowers — the millefiori or multiflorals. Tasters learn to trace different types of flowers — a hint of aromatic clover or the minty kick of lime blossom. Less pleasantly, they also learn to spot defects such as the overuse of smoke deployed by the beekeeper to pacify the bees when collecting the honey.
The queen bee of these courses is Lucia Piana, who runs a honey-testing laboratory in Bologna. She learnt about the new method soon after it was invented by a French researcher called Michel Gonnet, and worked with him before developing it in Italy.
You don’t need to have super-senses to be a good honey taster, says Piana: she thinks “what’s most important is the exercise — the more samples you have tried, the bigger your experience and your capacity to appreciate little differences”.
Daniela Caretto is a Puglia-based expert in organic produce with a love of honey. “I was curious to know more about the product and the innumerable different flavours and aromas that can be found in a honey jar,” she says of honing her tasting skills. She now judges at events such as Biolmiel, to be held in Italy in November, which aims to judge the best organic honeys in the world. At such events, honeys might be given marks out of 100 for appearance, aroma, texture, cleanness and taste.
The first task when faced with a new honey, says Caretto, is to look hard to see if it contains impurities. Does a monofloral honey come within the range of colours you’d expect? Honeys crystallise or stay runny according to their nectar source, so the tasters examine the texture to see if, for example, an acacia honey is as pale and limpid as it should be.
If you put honey into a balloon glass, it enhances the aroma so the tasters can assess whether it has a pleasant, characteristic scent or faults such as fermentation. The glass must be at room temperature and kept covered. At home, you get a similar waft of nature when you take the lid off a good honey and smell the meadows, parkland or mountainside.
People tend to know one or two kinds of honey — a brown liquid with the same taste. But there is a honey for everyone if you look for it
Finally, a small taste of honey — always on a plastic spoon, as metal affects the taste — allows you to evaluate its texture and flavour. A vocabulary of tastes, codified in a honey-tasting wheel, starts with types of flavour such as flowery, vegetal, fruity, woody and animal. “Then you can get creative — and most of the time you will,” says Caretto. Seashore, wet cement, fruit candy, cassata and pharmacy are the sorts of words that each pot might evoke.
Dedicated honey students spend 10 days on the course, finishing with an exam in order to enter the official National Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey. To remain on this list, they must hold lectures and tastings every year.
Most importantly, perhaps, the tasters are equipped to educate the rest of us. “To start with, people tend to know just one or two kinds of honey — just a brown liquid with the same taste,” says Gian Luigi Marcazzan, president of the government-funded register. In contrast to the bland blends of imported industrial honey, Italy has about 50 distinct types of monofloral honey, 22 of them closely studied and analysed. And every millefiori has its own character. Different honeys will appeal to different tastes. “There is a honey for everyone if you look for it,” he says.
Francesco Colafemmina, a beekeeper with a tasting training, runs a honey company in Puglia called La Pecheronza. His bees start their monofloral year in March with the cherry blossom. The region produces 40 per cent of the country’s cherries and the resulting honey has distinct notes of almond. The bees might then produce a delicate red clover honey, or be taken by Colafemmina in his truck down to the south coast near Taranto to make fragrant organic orange-blossom honey. They continue on to coriander, thyme and then the dark, intense chestnut honey that is so good drizzled over pecorino or Parmesan. The skill of the beekeeper is to put the hives in the right place at the right time.
Since each honey is unique to its time and place, it is a product that varies widely. Even in monofloral honeys the bees can fly where they want and gather in other nectars. Which begs the question: how can a honey be judged fairly?
A monofloral honey should be assessed on how characteristic it is, argues Lucia Piana, so the consumer knows what to expect. A chestnut honey, for example, is best if it is more intense and bitter. A multifloral, by contrast, is judged not on extremes but on equilibrium. Yet Piana admits that taste is also subjective. What the German honey fan might enjoy is not the same as the Sicilian.
Just as flowers and honeys vary around the world, so do tasting methods. Marina Marchese, a honey expert on the Italian register, has founded the American Honey Tasting Society where the flavour palette has a different vocabulary, including cranberry in the fruity types and “gym bag” among the vegetal.
Marcazzan now wants to spread the method to countries around the world, with the first English-language honey training course being held in Bologna in November. He would like beekeepers to take it up in the UK, where multiflorals abound. There is much still to learn before we can appreciate honey in its full glory, a taste of the infinite alchemy of bees and blooms.
Hattie Ellis is the author of ‘Spoonfuls of Honey’, published by Pavilion Books, £20.
Photograph by Felicity McCabe
The UK’s National Honey Show runs until October 28 at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey; honeyshow.co.uk
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos. Sign up for our Weekend Email here
Copyright The Financial Times Limited . All rights reserved. Please don't copy articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.