Workers at the Xifeng Distillery transport koji.
Before arriving at Baoji Fengxiang Liulin Town, first smell the aroma of wine.
The further you go, the stronger the aroma of the wine. Located in the center of this aroma, Xifeng Distillery, which has a 3,000-year-old craft heritage, is the founder and typical representative of China's Fengxiang liquor.
On December 6th, I took a tour bus into Xifeng Distillery, blowing through the warm winter breeze between my hair, and the smell of wine in front of my nose made people drunk before drinking. Pursuing the fragrance, a Xifeng Distillery full of the soul of the craftsman and the spirit of struggle slowly unfolded in front of the eyes.
This fragrance originates from the unique aroma of koji.
Qu is the soul of wine. Koji is not only the main saccharification agent in the production of liquor, but also provides the premise for liquor to determine the flavor of the substance or aroma substance that determines the style of the liquor.
Recent days have been sunny, and the high sun has brought about changes in temperature. Li Zongxin, the head of the music-making class of Xifeng Distillery, came to a music-making room. This batch of koji has reached the critical stage of cultivation, and the koji pieces are neatly stacked in the warehouse for "review". "The temperature difference between the upper and lower parts of the billet is too large, and it must be bent immediately!" Li Zongxin only touched the uppermost and lower layers of the curved brick pile with his hand, felt the temperature difference and immediately issued an order. At this time, 4 turning workers immediately divided their work and cooperated, and exchanged the lower curved bricks with the upper curved bricks in an orderly manner.
Li Zongxin has been doing this work for more than 30 years. For more than 30 years, he has been exploring the mysteries of wine music here, accompanying his "baby wine song". The spirit of the "winemaker" is vividly reflected in him. "The process of microbial cultivation is like taking care of babies, hot, cold, dry, wet." He said, "In order to better put into work, I have returned to work to this day, I have eaten and lived in the koji making room, and no one has ever left the door of the winery." ”
Mellow and elegant, sweet and refreshing, harmonious tastes, long tail. The unique phoenix aroma that distinguishes Xifeng liquor from all liquors on the market comes from this.
This aroma eventually becomes the most mellow aroma of aged wine.
The newly brewed liquor is like a newly adult guy, rampage, reckless, and whoever looks at it will shake his head and sigh "stunned". Only after years of precipitation and fermentation can we become more restrained and calm. Therefore, all the famous wineries have their own tricks to store liquor. In Xifeng Distillery, it is the big wine sea.
The large wine sea is a column vessel with a diameter of 2 meters to 2.5 meters and a height of 3 meters, which can generally store 5 tons to 6 tons of wine. Its raw material selection and production process are still complicated and abnormal in today's technology. It is made of wild thorns that grow at an altitude of more than 800 meters above sea level in the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains, weave them into large baskets before the moisture has disappeared, then fill the gaps with tofu, and then use the best bark paper and white cotton cloth to apply a hundred layers of mounting paste with biological glue made of egg whites, and finally coated with beeswax and rapeseed oil. In the production process of jiuhai, all processes must be completed step by step, and all mounting and coating must be dense and seamless, so as to ensure the storage function of jiuhai. Therefore, the production of each wine sea must go through half a year of complicated craftsmanship, while the slightly larger or larger wine sea takes 1 to 2 years.
In the wine cellar, you can fully appreciate the power of time. Many wine seas have been covered with wine bacteria, and the paper sticks that record the batches of wine have also turned yellow and been weathered into fragments. This sea of wine that will "breathe" is the "guardian spirit" of Xifeng wine from generation to generation.
Orderly, step-by-step... These are standard in a factory. But walking in the workshop of the wine-scented Xifeng wine factory, what you can see is a kind of passion and "craftsmanship" that is rare in other places. This hopeful drive can be found not only in traditional brewers and koji makers, but also in a variety of modern flow workshops. And this "craftsman spirit" is not a paper talk, closed door, but the combination of cultural inheritance and high-quality development, retired to inherit the craft, into the research and development of science and technology, not only can be a big stroke of the wine fairy, but also can roll up the sleeves to work hard of the modern craftsman soul.
"The name of the famous wine, the name in the quality, the name in the ingenuity." To brew fine wine, we are looking forward to the economic development of the 'flower good moon more round'. We roll up our sleeves and work hard in order to make the main liquor business bigger and stronger, create a Shaanxi liquor production area, and promote the high-quality development of the local economy. Zhang Zheng, secretary of the party committee and chairman of Xifeng Group, said.
Five thousand years of Chinese civilization, three thousand years of wine aroma. The more aged and mellow Xifeng wine aroma, through the thick factory building, with the hope of high-quality development, ushered in a new leap forward.