Who Has The #1 Best Mead In Australia?

Is this a clickbait title? Maybe a little but it’s actually something I’ve been thinking about lately.

You will find countless articles or videos of lists of ‘Top 5 Vacuum Cleaners’ or ‘Top 5 Anime Betrayals’ and with a physical product, it’s actually possible to put their properties to the test in comparison to determine a winner. Most videos just mention the product’s description as claimed by the manufacturer and they’ll be sure to include their affiliate link for all 5 items, totally no bias there of course!

With food or drink items however, everyone has different tastes, something I like is going to be different to something you like. For me this was nowhere more apparent than when I would do mead tastings at markets, some would say it’s perfect, some would say too sweet and some would say not sweet enough. Which ones are right and which ones are wrong? It’s not possible to say as everyone has different preferences when it comes to taste. The only thing I can say for certain is if like me, you like liquorice, you are correct, that is the correct answer.

From a business point of view, all one can do is try to appease the majority, which unfortunately will not make the minority happy but that can’t be helped sometimes. This is why for Honey Wines Australia at least, we try to have enough variety in our flavours to cater to quite a wide range of tastes.

Food & Drink Competitions Are Pointless

There, I said it. This will be an unpopular opinion with people who have gold medals for their product but let’s be serious, for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraphs, food-related awards need to be taken with a grain of salt and that is why I have no interest in participating in one. Awards are a nice marketing tool to be able to say ‘my *** is a gold medal winner’. Competition winners are welcome to say that and I don’t begrudge them that.

The way I look at it though is, Okay… 2-3 judges said yours was the best on the day, what about if there were 20 judges, 50 judges or 100 judges? I expect totally different results.

How Do We Know Who Has The Best Mead In Australia Then?

Personally, I think it’s not possible to answer.

Volume of sales isn’t a deciding factor as that merely shows who has the biggest production facility and distribution network.

From a buyer’s perspective, all I can think of is looking at customer reviews of a given product, there will, of course, be negative opinion outliers but if something has mostly positive reviews, then unless you have very strange taste buds then there is a high probability you will like it too.