Blue Honey Country Wine and Meads Co., Ramona’s only meadery, is tucked away just off Vista Ramona Road.
Christine and Kody Boger officially started selling the fruit wine and mead they made out of their home in July 2022. In just two and a half years the couple have won 19 medals, nearly half of them gold.
Five medals, two of them gold, came from the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition, one of the largest international mead competitions, said Christine Boger.
“There’s four main competitions and we’ve won medals in all of them,” she said. “We felt like we were heading in the right direction and we grew.”
Boger worked in finance before the pandemic, but was unable to continue while taking care of her parents. Her husband, who is in the U.S. Navy, was overseas.
“I decided to go on YouTube, look up some videos on winemaking and pick up a hobby,” she said.
Boger started out making sake, a wine made from rice, then moved into country wines made from fruits and eventually took on mead, wine made from honey.
Once her husband got back from his tour in Japan she upped production and started running taste tests.
“It’s not hard to find people to try out alcohol, especially with his military friends,” she said with a laugh. “We did a lot of testing with friends and family and got a great response.”
Kody Boger described his wife as “the chemist.” He assists in the fermenting process and quality control.
“We come up with recipes together,” he said. “We bounce ideas off each other and things like that.”
Fruit wine and mead are both fermented much like grape wine, Boger said, but since fruits have less natural sugar than grapes, additional sugar has to be added to raise the alcohol content.
Christine Boger said she found that the base recipe of mead is incredibly simple — honey, yeast and water — and from there other fruits and ingredients can be added to change the flavor.
The Transcendent mead, made from Trumper’s Honey in Ramona and Ramona Fresh Fruit crabapples, won double gold at the 2023 Mead Crafter’s competition.
Sometimes the fermenting process can be pretty involved. For the Transcendent mead, Boger cooks down the honey first. The Trumper’s honey used in that mead is from a mix of alfalfa and buckwheat, which gives the honey a very robust “barnyard taste,” she said.
The flavor was so strong that she initially wasn’t sure what to do with it, she said, but when she tried one of the crabapples from Ramona Fresh Fruits, she had an idea.
“We cooked the honey down to burn some flavor off but it also caramelized the honey so you get toffee notes, caramel notes,” she said. “Then we folded in the crabapples and we got Best of Show.”
As a new mead-maker, Boger enters contests mainly to get the and gauge where she’s at. The first meads she entered in the 2021 Mead Crafters Competition were the Honey Lavender, which won silver, and Purple Reign blueberry mead, which won bronze.
“The notes and I got was what I really wanted,” she said. “Once I got the from them I improved the recipe and they won gold [the following year].”
Boger attributes part of her success to her lack of experience in the industry. She went into it with no idea of what mead was supposed to taste like, and ran a comparison of her first batch to a bottle of mead she found at Bevmo to make sure she was on the right track.
Without any preconceived notions of what mead should taste like or how it should be made, she was able to embrace the creative side of her job, said said.
Boger focuses on incorporating unique flavors in her mead, such as the Purple Reign, blueberry mead made with tangerine blossom honey from Hawaii; Smashing Pumpkin, which balances the strong pumpkin smell on the nose with the nutty squash flavor; and CEO, with notes of chocolate, espresso and orange.
The fermenting operation takes place inside a detached garage next to the Bogers’ house. Christine Boger pointed out the three fermenters filled with blueberry lemon wine.
“Once she gets the reading and everything’s good we’ll rack it off of that and start the aging and clearing process,” her husband said.
Throughout the fermentation process Christine Boger measures the amount of sugar content left in the wine. The sugar content goes down as the yeast eats it, she said, which raises the alcohol content.
The honey used for the meads is carefully selected and sourced from several places. Aside from Trumper’s Honey, Kody Boger said it is sourced from Wao Kelle Honey in Hawaii.
“Honey is one of the most faked products,” he said. “We know this vendor in Hawaii is a certified beekeeper and the same with Trumper’s. The honey we use, we know is real honey.”
Local produce is also used in Blue Honey meads and country wine. All the strawberries and blueberries come from Pamo Valley, Christine Boger said.
“We try to keep it as local as possible,” she said. “We don’t get the good fruit, we get the ugly fruit, the fruit that nobody wants to buy because it’s the ripest.”
Buying locally in this way makes for a “fruitful relationship,” Boger said. The farmers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to sell the fruit give her a discount.
In addition, Blue Honey will buy as much unused fruit as they can from individuals who don’t want their fruit to go to waste.
“You’d be surprised how many people around here have fruit they can’t get rid of,” Kody Boger said. “People are ing us about pomegranates, limes, lemons, all over the place. We can help mitigate that by buying it instead of it just going back on someone’s property.”
With mead becoming more mainstream in the last five to 10 years, Christine Boger said her hope has been to bring something unique to San Diego.
She’s currently working on making dry meads, she said, to appeal to the wine drinkers. Since most wine drinkers don’t like the sweet wines as much, she said, it’s a challenge to get them to try mead.
“Our goal has been to turn wine drinkers into more mead drinkers,” Boger said. “The way we make our mead is like wine, we’re not carbonating it, we’re not reducing the alcohol, so we try to make it very traditional like wine.”
The couple aren’t planning to expand operations or move into a brick and mortar anytime soon. The current situation allows them to make enough money to keep the business sustainable.
Throughout her time making mead and country wine, Christine Boger said the goal has always been to meet new people and make them happy.
“We love doing this, we love helping out the community and we love that people help us out,” she said. “It’s a give and give back type of thing.”
For more information about Blue Honey visit www.bluehoneywinesandmeads.com or call 760-654-3103
