This recipe was originally developed by me back in the Dark Ages of meadmaking in the US (i.e. ca 1980-1981) to be used as a festive, semi-sweet spiced drink to be enjoyed during Yule events in the Principality of Ansteorra within the SCA. (That's east Texas, for y'all not familiar with SCA geography.) Back then very little was widely known about fermentation of honey-based musts, so we did a lot by trial and error (actually, we learned from more than a few errors!). However, I had some knowledge of winemaking principles that I'd learned from my uncle, so I wasn't as completely in the dark about fermentation processes as many of my contemporaries were. Over the years I modified the recipe slightly to account for newly acquired knowledge about proper "feeding" of yeast, etc., but the basic ingredients and their proportions haven't changed from that original batch. The recipe as described herein is the "modernized" version, with some historical notes that I thought might be of interest. So this has been in near continuous use by me and by some of the folks that I later taught meadmaking to for over a quarter century -- I guess that might qualify it as a "heritage" recipe of sorts!