Miel de tilleul de Picardie IGP (Picardy Linden Honey)

Bee Species:

Western honey bee (Apis mellifera). The IGP rules name the species and no subspecies.

Color:

Pale straw yellow with greenish glints; creamy white once set, pale gold while liquid.

Flavor Profile:

Fresh and mentholated, with a pharmaceutical edge some tasters call camphor; astringent; medium sweetness and acidity.

Tasting Notes:

The producers reach for the same words: a supported taste of lemony mint at one house, fresh, mentholated and persistent at another, pronounced, fresh and delicately mentholated at a third; a producer training as a juror adds menthol first and powerfully, then camphor, then medicinal at the finish. One buyer, writing in 2018 of a jar from the Halluette, found eucalyptus and a silky texture. The finish is medium to long.

Aroma:

Vegetal, with fresh, mentholated notes of medium to strong intensity.

Defining Compounds:

Electrical conductivity at most 0.7 mS/cm. Honeydew honeys conduct more than nectar honeys, so the ceiling is in effect the line that keeps honeydew out; the rules state the limit and, separately, the nectar-only origin. Water at most 18 per cent and HMF at most 10 mg/kg at extraction, which is why the honey may not be warmed over a flame or with direct steam.

Forage Origin:

Primary: tilleul (linden, Tilia spp., Malvaceae). The linden is the lime tree of British usage, no relation to the citrus fruit that shares that name: the tree of village squares and avenues, whose dried flowers are the tilleul of the French herbal infusion, and which the IGP file records among the medicinal plants of Picardy in a list of 1907. The IGP rules certify honey “from the nectar of the flowers of Tilia sp.” and name no species; the file’s account of the land says the small-leaved linden, Tilia cordata, is the species that matters in Picardy, wild and self-sown, and that a hectare of it yields more than 500 kg of nectar against about 200 for the large-leaved linden, Tilia platyphyllos. In the 2013 forest inventory the file cites, linden was 3.2 per cent of the region’s standing timber, the eighth species by volume, about 8.29 million trees on 7,600 hectares. The forestry service’s 2016 fiche for the state forest of Samoussy gives linden a third of the wooded area, behind pedunculate oak alone. How it got there is a land-use history, not a soil claim: the forests were long run as taillis sous futaie, coppice with standards, and a linden stump cut back “can throw up a dozen stems”, so each rotation multiplied the tree. The regional environment directorate’s sheet for the forest of Halatte describes the south of that forest as coppice with standards of oaks and lindens, and the park’s booklet records the regime since the Middle Ages and its end: the forestry service took the forest in 1966 and its 1997-2011 plan converted the coppice to oak high forest, abandoning the coppice cuts in the south. What that does to the linden flow in the decades ahead, no source has yet said.

Secondary: châtaignier (sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa, Fagaceae). Chestnut pollen is one of the three marker pollens the rules name, which is how a laboratory tells a Picardy linden honey.

Supporting: ronce (bramble, Rubus fruticosus agg., Rosaceae). The third marker pollen, from the hedges and forest edges.

Background: tournesol (sunflower, Helianthus annuus, Asteraceae) and colza (rapeseed and other crucifers, Brassicaceae). The rules’ list of pollens that may appear as isolated grains includes both: the arable plain around the forests turns up inside the forest honey.

Pairings:

A beer: Bee Mousse, brewed for the Chavignon house with linden honey from the Saint-Gobain and Samoussy forests. A mead: the Fourneaux house’s linden goes into a sparkling hydromel its maker describes with thyme, rosemary and undergrowth as well as mint.