Start with the essence of Chinese winemaking
In “Huangdi Neijing,” (“Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor”) the ancient Chinese medical text the composition of which dates to between the late Warring States period (476-221 BC) and the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), there was a scene of the Yellow Emperor (a deity in Chinese religion who lived in 2717-2599 BC) discussing winemaking with doctor Qi Bo. The book also mentioned an ancient wine called
Brewing wine with (wine fermentation starter) is the real essence of Chinese winemaking. It’s used to produce both grain wines and distilled liquor, plus the sweet fermented glutinous rice that’s often eaten as a dessert soup.
The mechanism of is more complicated than distiller’s yeast. It’s a combination of different molds, yeasts and bacteria which is cultured on starch-rich grains such as wheat and rice. The function of is to act as a source of microbes and enzymes to enable the fermentation process, breaking down the carbohydrates, proteins and lipids.
To make the first step is to prepare cereal grains, then add microbiota and incubate the mixture in a warm and humid environment to stimulate its growth. Once complete, it’s dried for a longer preservation time. Today you can buy packaged from the supermarket to make rice wine,
and more.
The grains used to make vary across China. They include wheat, barley and rice.
There are different types of in China, ranging from (small starter), (large starter) to
(red starter), which is the red rice cultured with red rice molds of the Monascus genus.
Wine filtration techniques were lacking in ancient times, so the tiny granules of the white fermented mash couldn’t be filtered, resulting in a quite thick and cloudy wine color, hence the name which translates into unstrained wine or liquor.
The wine people drank in the Three Kingdoms period (AD 220-280) was
and it was a quite primitive form without the steaming or filtering processes. The alcohol content was less than 10 percent.
There were also fruit wines, milk wines and even spice wines in the early dynasties, though they were not as popular as the grain wines.
or rice wine, took winemaking to a new level. The wine brewing technique with was improved over time to achieve different flavors and textures, such as dry, semi-dry, semi-sweet and sweet according to the sugar content.
Distilled liquor was introduced to China in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) from Arabia. According to the “Ben Cao Gang Mu” (“Compendium of Materia Medica”) by Li Shizhen (1518-93), distilled liquor, appeared in the Yuan Dynasty and it was made by distilling high density fermented wine and purifying the liquid.
The reign of the Yuan Dynasty was short and the people didn’t develop the habit of drinking the stronger or liquor. The distillation techniques of white liquor became mature gradually in the following two dynasties, Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911), and the level of alcohol content also increased.
Getting drunk
Wine drinking is a crucial social activity in the “Romance of Three Kingdoms,” and it seems that the ancient people had an enormous level of alcohol tolerance — they didn’t drink by glass or shot, but by which means bucket in Chinese or by bowl.
It may sound frightening, but the weights and measures in ancient China were different from today.
One liter in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24) was equivalent to only 0.3 liters today while the liter in the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220) was less than today’s 0.2 liters.
The size of the bowl used to drink wine back then was also smaller than the average bowl today. They were more like small plates.
The early Chinese wines had a much lower alcohol content as well. The fermented alcoholic drinks had less than 20 percent alcohol, as did the early
Drinking a whole lot of wine wasn’t comparable to today’s strong liquors with 40-60 percent alcohol content.
The taste of the ancient wines and liquors were mild and not as spicy as modern drinking bowls of wine was similar to drinking beer or rice wine today, which people can drink by bottle.
The ancient people also spent a much longer time drinking, often through the whole night because there wasn’t much to do, so they drank larger quantities of wine over a longer timespan.
Another factor to consider is overstatement, as exaggeration was a popular rhetoric technique in Chinese literature. A lot of times, the ancient people weren’t drinking as much as they claimed, like Li Bai, an alcoholic poet from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618907) who wrote: “There are 36,000 days in 100 years, and 300 cups of wine should be consumed a day.”