Black Cherry Chocolate Mead

Today I started a Black Cherry Chocolate mead using a recipe I found online and of course tweaked a little bit to my personal tastes. I will add the recipe as I made it to the recipe section. Meads are wines made with honey as the primary fermentable sugar and are very long-term wine projects, taking quite a while to age. A mead will typically need to age a year at minimum, and even longer is better if you can stand the wait. I have meads that are 5-6 years old and are just hitting their prime. I expect this one to be ready to sample around Valentines Day 2023, which seems a really appropriate tasting date for a chocolate wine. I have made chocolate wines before, a chocolate strawberry that was fairly tasty but a real mess to make, and a chocolate raspberry dessert wine that was more of a higher gravity port-style wine and absolutely delicious. This black cherry batch was a simple recipe with just two main ingredients to start with, black cherry juice and honey. I will add some Cacao nibs to the secondary fermentation and taste every few weeks until I get the level of chocolate flavor I'm looking for. I also used a generic wildflower honey, you can get different results with different types of honey such as orange blossom or clover, especially if you want a lighter color, but for this batch wildflower will work fine. This was another 1-gallon batch, lately I have been doing more small batch experimenting, my usual batch size being 5 or 6 gallons. The smaller batches allow me to try new (and maybe unusual?) things without committing to the cost of a large batch, and potentially ending up with 5 gallons of something that tastes like Gatorade-flavored lighter fluid. The obvious drawback to small batch winemaking is that if it's successful you end up with only a gallon of wine, but that's only a minor inconvenience, if the result turns out to be something you want to replicate you can always follow up with a larger batch. I currently have beet, carrot, and this black cherry chocolate in 1-gallon batches, and one other I will be writing about soon. In the interim, I will be searching out more uncommon ingredients to try making into wine, no telling what may be coming next!