There are lots of varieties, lots of subtle flavors, and while the base may be honey it's fermented honey, so that means it won't taste quite like regular honey. :) It's usually classified along with wine, and bottled as such.
I would not recommend just finding a bottle at a liquor or wine store and buying it though... 90% of the time you're going to get CRAP. Sometimes not even real mead... a lot of places will just mix cheap white wine with honey to make a sweetened wine that they call mead. It's not. They're lying. It's pyment, not mead. Pyment is any alcoholic drink that has both grapes and honey in it. In order for it to be both a pyment and a mead, the the honey has to be fermented. And obviously in order to be able to call it wine as well, the grapes have to be fermented. The worst offender, IMO, is
http://liquorama.net/browseproducts/Bunratty-Meade.HTML">Bunratty. Some people like it... mostly people who like cloyingly sickeningly sweet drinks. I personally can't stand it.
If you find a bottle of
http://www.chaucerswine.com/mead.asp">Chaucer's that's a good start. It's a fairly plain, basic mead. Slightly on the sweet side for my taste, but I tend to favor drier drinks. Most people would probably rank it in the middle as far as sweetness goes. It's not the best, but it's usually cheaper than the crappy ones and it's not bad. And they include a free spice packet if you want to try hot mulled mead. (which I highly recommend on cold days. I've started bringing cider and mead and mulling spices to family celebrations like thanksgiving and christmas.) It's kind of the basic standard that you can find in a lot of stores, one of the few that doesn't completely suck. :P A lot of the snobs online try to complain about it, but they're just... being snobs. :P I recommend serving either refridgerated, or heated with the spices. It's not as good at room temperature.
If you can find a polish or finnish mead (or mjod as they're sometimes called), those are often more like cordials made from honey than anything else. They are often very thick and/or very sweet. Some recipes will call for half honey, half water. Others will have more water... but then they ice distill it so that it will become thicker and sweeter... and have more alcohol. They're also usually very VERY expensive though, since the aging time is at the very least several years, and at the most a few decades.