By Julia Pepper, @julia_pepper23

The following article is the start of an ongoing series that aims to explore the place and path of “ancestral wine”, navigating the intersection of culture, agricultural science, and commerce that makes ancestral wines such a core part of diaspora cultures.*

This is an attempt to translate the depth of Chinese wine in a US context, somewhere in the middle of food science and oral history.

On a hot July day in 2008, my grandmother caught a wayward snake on the cool tile floor of my family’s old apartment in the Dongshan neighborhood of Guangzhou. Grandma (nickname?) has always been a no-nonsense woman. One smooth motion was all it took; as she tells it, she grabbed the ophidian from the floor; gave it a smack against the counter to render it unconscious; and plopped it unceremoniously in a giant, brown glass filled with rice vinegar. The lid was sealed shut and shrouded with a piece of plastic wrap. Then, the urn was relegated to the kitchen cupboard closest to the family altar to Guanyin and forgotten for a decade. After graduating from Fudan, the family decamped for new shores. When they visited their old home years later, jug, snake, and snake wine were all gone. To this day, my grandmother still laments the thousands in snake wine lost when we moved from China to the States.

However, my grandmother did emigrate with her impossibly vast knowledge of agriculture and gardening. She acquired this practical wealth tilling rice patties when she was young. In her new home, she grew lush heads of lettuce; impossibly long string beans; and squash twice as large and long as my head-so green they almost glowed. In fact, her first triumphant act after the move was to painstakingly replace our new lawn with vegetable beds.

During long summers in the suburbs of New York City, my grandmother laid large pastel tubs of submerged sticky rice on the kitchen floor; large, repurposed glass jugs stationed nearby at the ready. Year after year, I’d walk downstairs to find her stepping on the rice, mashing it. Then she dumped the mash onto the kitchen island to air out. The rested mix was portioned into one of the behemoth jars. A store bought starter, imported from Shanghai, was added. Finally, she carefully wrote out a prayer from one of the sutras in sharpie on a strip of red paper. We’d heft the batch into our new cupboards. Then came the wait.

One day in the depth of each winter, I would wake up and yelp as I stepped on the ice cold floor. The door would be cracked open just enough to preview the Northeast winter that awaited during my walk to school. But, the open door was for the Ancestors who were being invited inside for a warm meal. Incense burned at the head of the kitchen table (which was actually two Ikea tables pushed together and covered with a tablecloth) and eight places were set in front of the wooden chairs. The formal tableware was out, plates that were brown at the edges with the centermost circle colorfully painted with scenes from dynasties old in bright colors; matched tiny tea cups that fit between your thumb and forefinger; small gold goblets stamped with characters for fortune, health, abundance for wine from years past. One of the wine jugs was positioned at the center of the table, surrounded by offerings of food: fried tofu, zongzi, steamed bamboo sprouts, carrot cakes made from the same sticky rice as the wine, and a whole chicken. We make sure the ancestors eat well, and drink well too, with food and wine made with our own hands to honor the sacrifices they made.

“Rice wine –no mei zou– is ubiquitous at every holiday, Western or Eastern, at funerals and visits to shrines; the drink is one of the only connectors of a family that transcends time.”

Chinese wine culture, like many cultures that fall under the new ‘ancestral wine’ movement, is borne out of fermenting whatever’s there, with whatever’s available. The result is a decadent, diverse palette of flavors that can turn from bitter to sweet within a single sip, sometimes with hints of fruitiness or spice. Borne out of the chaos of home brewing, no two batches taste exactly the same. Every family is a little different, but for mine it’s never really about drinking the wine for the sake of drinking the wine. Rice wine– no mei zou– is ubiquitous at every holiday, Western or Eastern, at funerals and visits to shrines; the drink is one of the only connectors of a family that transcends time. No mei zou is wine that both honors those who came before and made our lives possible and celebrates how we move forward. It’s also a story of knowledge lost (particularly during the bans on homebrewing imposed during the Japanese occupation) and reacquired. In the growing conversation about returning to ancestral wine practices within US food culture and writing, where does Chinese alcohol fit?

“In the growing conversation about returning to ancestral wine practices within US food culture and writing, where does Chinese alcohol fit?”

Despite a storied history, Chinese alcohol exists in something of a liminal space within the realm of ‘natural’ wine. “There are these unspoken belief systems that say one is worth more than the other,” observed Mara King, chef and author of The People’s Republic of Fermentation. “A Japanese meal is worth more than a Chinese meal. In a Japanese restaurant the ingredients are high quality; at a Chinese restaurant, the ingredients are low quality. We have these expectations in the United States of Asian food because of the exposure in this [US] country.”

King outlined three main factors contributing to widespread adoption: commercial availability, local production, and connoisseurship. When comparing the rise of Japanese and Chinese food in the United States, for instance, Japanese food and wine “came up” in the food world at approximately the same time, and as a result disseminated at approximately the same time. Sushi bars become ubiquitous, with sushi itself also becoming available at supermarkets, and sake production in the United States, for the the United States market, becomes more widespread, particularly in Portland and San Francisco: this also allows for the rise of connoisseurship, of sake pairings becoming as normalized as wine pairings. Mara also notes that sake, despite also being made from rice, tends to have a less varied note than Chinese baijiu, and could be more aligned with the Western palette for this reason. Baijiu, though, has so much nuance to it in its own right: umami palettes, savory and salty, at times even sweet and citrus-y notes mixed in with the above. “There’s a lot that’s really ‘foreign,’ and it takes something of an education for people to appreciate it.”

The story of this richness begins with mold: unlike other types of alcohol brewed with rice, like soju and sake, baijiu uses wild fermentation instead of dealing with more pure cultures. “Mold based fermentation has a long history in China,” Mara says. Some factories that produce it have been using the same cultures for over 400 years, with the earliest written recipes for such spontaneous fermentation dating back at least 2,750 years.

Even within the baijiu umbrella, diversity abounds: all in all, there are eleven formally classified forms based on four primary flavor types: maotai flavored to strong (or Luzhou) flavored, light, and rice flavored. Just as China’s food culture varies widely depending on the region, with local food being as much of a fingerprint of where one is from as dialect,  baijiu is divided into different types based on production area, process, starter type, and the resulting flavor. Two fermentation processes are typically involved – jiuqu making and baijiu making. Jiuqu refers to the starter for the fermentation – the raw materials, microflora, enzymes and aromas that ultimately create the flavor profile. The latter refers to the alcoholic fermentation process. Because of the semi-controlled environment, it’s difficult to generalize a single process for its production: more than 2,400 chemicals have been identified that contribute to baijiu’s flavor to date, and the “tastemaking” process of categorizing such flavors is still in its earliest stages.

“Even today, in industrial factories producing baijiu and other fermented foods that are staples in the Chinese diet, wild fermentation is the norm for how mold is grown.”

Even today, in industrial factories producing baijiu and other fermented foods that are staples in the Chinese diet, wild fermentation is the norm for how mold is grown. A state-sponsored factory in Sichuan province making doubanjiang features an entire football fields’ worth of fermentation happening simultaneously, all with the same wild cultures. There still isn’t any consensus on what exactly causes the spontaneous fermentation – it could be the space that has been used multiple times, or the people and place; perhaps this brand of mold is native to Sichuan.

Further, it would be remiss to equate all of Chinese alcohol culture to baijiu, despite the wine’s diversity. The practice of homebrewing wine in a combination of reptiles, shochu, a concentrated mixture distilled from rice that’s around 40% alcohol, is also fairly common and informal.

Summers where we went back to Guangzhou always involved, at some point, a visit to my family’s old village, where my great grandmother is buried. The sun is so hot I half expect my back to melt off. The climb begins by crossing a concrete bridge over a small, muddy, creek to access a path upwards that runs – perilously slippery and steep – next to a former neighbor’s paddy field. Then it’s upwards across a dirt path that spirals upwards through sharp grass that used to leave cuts across my forearms when I was shorter, grabbing exposed roots as handholds to cross the steepest parts. A few other small shrines are scattered here and there along the path, well trodden. Then, across a grassy knoll, we’re there– a large concrete monument for tai tai flanked by two clay ovens for burning offerings, usually money and large gold pieces my grandmother has folded herself out of gold paper from a Chinese supermarket in Brooklyn. The wine has made it too, thanks to the stamina of my uncle, this time bought from an old friend of my grandmothers’ who runs a local tea store. The village stretches far below, almost imperceptible between the trees– classic Chinese architecture, a combination of wooden and concrete walls and paved courtyards standing behind wet fields of rice; trying to catch a bit of a breeze, with the fire adding to the humidity, we pour some out in a line directly onto the memorial, and set out three cups to honor her memory.

As much as agricultural practices, cultural and informal production practices shape how foodways operate and are important in discussions on how they’re made more sustainable. “I think there’s this really interesting natural and karmic thing that’s going on with these cultures, many of whom are incredibly long standing. In China, these cultures are very much alive. People ferment their own rice alcohol in villages all over China everyday: the alcohol culture is still very much intact in that country. But when you look at other countries that have literally become part of the Japanese empire, you can see how much the alcohol culture has been disrupted.”

“People recognize that power comes from being able to control [alcohol production]. That power was held by monks, religious organizations, or by the government throughout history – it has been less in the hands of the people. It is still illegal today to homebrew alcohol in Japan.” - Mara King

In Taiwan and Korea, Mara explains, it became illegal to homebrew alcohol in the years around 1911 – when Taiwan first became a Japanese colony – to around 2011. (The law was only changed so people could make beer). In Korea, between the 1930s and the late 1990s, homebrewing was also made illegal. “I think it’s really fascinating to see how one culture can control another, and alcohol production in Japan has always been really controlled: people recognize that power comes from being able to control it. That power was held by monks, religious organizations, or by the government throughout history – it has been less in the hands of the people. It is still illegal today to homebrew alcohol in Japan.”

The homebrewing practices that are core to the experience of Chinese alcohol culture provide a more pluralistic engagement with the food system. “There are a lot of similarities [to Japan] in the USA where alcohol production is also controlled by the government. Why would the government want to strictly control alcohol production? Is it a way of controlling human beings? Is it a way of controlling money? Wherever you find that people have a long enough history of that [alcohol production] being a skill they just come into life with, though, you can see in those spaces more robust agricultural food systems, because the government is not controlling this one major aspect of the food system. It's such a natural thing - you grow grapes, you make wine, you have wine, you enjoy wine. That is an important part of being in an agronomic situation. For one reason or another, if governments intervene and begin controlling the agronomics, it takes the human beings out of the system. Human beings are losing the knowledge, the practice– it takes years and years to become a master, because there's so many subtle variations to how you can go about doing things. By controlling the systems of production, you take the people out of the equation, you remove them literally from the natural world and how they would interact with that space.”

When exploring the world of Chinese wine, then, in some ways it's even harder to separate the final product from the people and places that made it, given how ingrained it is in cultural rituals. Chinese wine and alcohol culture has been given an unprecedented amount of leeway to evolve organically through a combination of formal and homebrewing processes tied together by the common practice of wild fermentation that makes each result unique and worthy of consideration. It’s also a challenge to the image of what one conventionally thinks of as “natural” wine. As Mara articulates, in the beginning all wine was natural, a way of engaging directly with food systems and a crucial part of how humans interact with foodways. As the movement continues to evolve as the culture is carried around the world through the diaspora, perhaps this relationship could also play a role in deconstructing how foodways have been designed in modern food systems and who they benefit, integrating the formal and informal labor and cultural elements that make up “natural” wine into broader conversations about the its relationship to agriculture and food science.