by | June 10, 2026
Meet the Orlando Meadery Reviving the World’s Oldest Wine
From dry pours to fruit-forward blends, Zymarium Meadery is giving ancient honey wine a distinctly Florida twist with local ingredients and award-winning craftsmanship.
Walking down Orlando’s artsy Mills 50 neighborhood, you might miss it—a stark black building tucked between noodle houses and strip malls. Inside, though, the scene glows. Geometric lights warm the space, while gold taps flow with a sweet brew and regulars clink glasses and sample flights. This isn’t the typical craft beer brewery or glitzy Champagne bar Orlando is used to. It’s a meadery.
“Just like wine is made from grapes and cider is made from apples, mead is made from honey,” says Joe Leigh, a co-owner of Zymarium Meadery, which opened in 2023. “We use all local honey, which is really cool to work with local pollinators. But just because (mead) is made with honey doesn’t mean it has to be sweet.”
Dating back to 7000 B.C. in China, mead is one of the world’s oldest fermented drinks, blending honey, water and yeast into a libation known as honey wine. Styles range from dry and bubbly to rich, barrel-aged pours. At Zymarium, Leigh leans into that range with almost 30 different meads on draft, helping position Orlando’s first meadery at the forefront of a revival of the ancient drink.
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Leigh’s hard work is earning global attention. In 2024, Zymarium won six medals in the Mazer Cup competition—often considered the Olympics of mead—and was the only meadery in the world to do so. Its bottles are also racking up 90-plus scores in international wine competitions, where entries are judged blind by credentialed sommeliers.
“After two years, we ended up with the most 90-plus point meads in the world,” he says.
But how does honey go from sweet and sticky to something drinkable? Leigh sources honey within two hours of Orlando, then mixes it with water and yeast to induce fermentation. “The amount of honey we use determines how much alcohol it produces and how sweet it is,” he explains.
We use all local honey, which is really cool to work with local pollinators.
– Joe Leigh
From there, Zymarium breaks tradition. “We actually specialize in what we call our Endless Meads, where we use all fruit and no water,” Leigh says. “When we do that, we’re getting 2,000 pounds of fruit and covering it in local honey and fermenting it like a big red wine style. It’s the ultimate expression of honey and fruit together.”
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A recent release, Endless Boysenberry, blends Willamette Valley boysenberries with blackberry blossom and black gum tupelo honey. Leigh describes it as similar to a Napa dessert cabernet. “It is everything you love about red wine and honey at the same time.”
While Leigh, who has been making mead since 2014 and was named one of the top 10 mead makers in the world by the American Mead Makers Association, serves as the master brewer, his co-owner and wife, Ginger, shapes the space’s atmosphere. Ginger, who also goes by Synthestruct, is a visual artist known for her light, audio and interactive installations.
“People walk in and say they feel like they’re in Berlin, or they’re somewhere else in the world,” Ginger says. But guests also say Zymarium feels like home, which is exactly what the couple wants.
