With some heavy tannin or acid to balance I can handle sweeter mead, though my version of tolerably sweet is under 1.005 - what I've found so far is that in traditionals, any sweeter than that and the acid additions that are necessary to balance it are so high that they destroy the "mead" character and instead it takes on the character of a highly acidic sweet white or rose wine. I do plan to experiment with heavy tannin additions in batches that have finished non-dry to see if that works better than acid additions, maybe tannin will leave it still recognisable as mead.
Don't get me wrong, I can drink meads sweeter, but I cringe a bit and have to go very slowly! Balance is everything, but as I said before, I don't think acid is necessarily the best balancing agent for mead.
I find that after some point in aging a totally dry mead changes to become suddenly "thicker" in its mouthfeel, almost sticky or tacky like beeswax (I think I detect a similar taste to beeswax as well, but this is primarily in Alfalfa honey and might just be my mind playing tricks on me).
After a year or more I do not find a dry mead to be abrasively dry (sometimes abrasively dry is nice though) unless there have been acid or tannin additions (heavy ones), I find a dry mead to be round and full (not for the first while though) with a distinct sensation of "perceived sweetness"... I don't know if there's something in mead that is non-sugar but is sweet, or what, but a dry mead still tastes a little sweet to me (could be too that even at 0.990 they aren't truely dry).
Now on to my very short rant - I think everyone who starts mead should make a dry traditional mead one of their first batches. Everyone thinks they won't like it, but it can always be backsweetened later. Also, when trying to introduce mead to others, anyone who's tried mead has the same response to me: "yuck, that stuff is too sweet, no thank you" or at best, "yeah, it was pretty sweet, not something I'd drink often". Even when explaining what mead is to wine or beer drinkers they respond with puckered looking faces "isn't that really really sweet?". I constantly have to explain that it doesn't have to be sweet, it can be a nice dry drink as well.
I think if more people were trying dry traditionals (good ones, properly aged) more people would stick with mead, rather than leaving it as a once in a while novelty like ice wine. I think dry meads would garner more respect from the wine drinking community as well (though they probably would still only ever look at it as a novelty).
Anyways, sorry for the long rambling post. Dry mead is my passion, and it's discouraging to see it be the most neglected form of mead (whether mel or trad etc) when I consider it to be by far the best. (Who knows though, maybe my tannin experiments will lead me to prefer a semi-sweet mead with truckloads of tannin over a dry mead... anything could happen!)
