"A Bite of China" says that sweet and sour is the basic consensus of most foreigners about Chinese food outside China. In the taste experience of Chinese, sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and salty, "sour" is also the first of the five tastes.
Before the invention of edible vinegar, green plum was the most important condiment for people to know and eat sourness, and its status was almost comparable to salt. A piece of trivia is that China is the birthplace of green plums, which have been cultivated in China for more than 7,000 years.
Qingmei is not only native to China, but also because China has the world's most dramatic natural landscape, plateaus, mountains, forests, rivers, lakes, coastlines, and the richness and diversity brought by the geographical span also string together the unique charm of Chinese green plum.
So, where are the best green plum producers in China?
As the first step in winemaking, it is important to choose the right green plum. Therefore, this problem is too familiar to Umemi, the leading domestic plum wine brand.
Due to the influence of climate, precipitation and other factors, the taste of the wine produced from green plums varies from different production areas and different years. In the production area with abundant sunshine and mild climate, the green plum produced has high acidity and full size, and the green plum wine produced has a richer flavor and better taste. In order to allow more people to enjoy the aroma and elegance of plums, Umemi spent five years conducting more than 1,700 flavor tests on the aroma, acidity, and aging characteristics of more than 100 varieties of plums. It is this kind of dedication and persistence that allows the plum wine produced by Umemi to have a strong terroir and outstanding quality. It also gave Umemi more say in the green plum production area.
Zhao'an, Fujian Province, one of the plum producing areas, has been growing green plums since the Song Dynasty, and the warm and humid air currents of the Pacific Ocean come ashore from the Taiwan Strait, bringing abundant rain to this place, coupled with the abundant selenium in the soil, which firmly locks in the unique fruit aroma and fruit acid; Puning, Guangdong Province, located in the plains, is the "hometown of Chinese green plums", where green plums are famous for their large flesh and high acidity, and are also another important source of plum plums.
Dayi, Sichuan, which is also one of China's six major green plum producing areas, is a plateau environment that grows freely in the golden climate zone of 30 ° north latitude. Dayi's Xiling Snow Mountain belongs to the branch of the Minshan Mountain Range, with a maximum altitude of more than 5,000 meters, covered with snow all year round, and has a typical three-dimensional climate and vertical landform. At a high altitude of 1800~2300 meters, there are ancient varieties of native Chinese green plums.
Zhao'an in Fujian Province and Eryuan in Yunnan Province are also important production areas of Meijian. On the one hand, the selection of these four major production areas makes it convenient to complement the flavors of green plum fruits, for example, Umemi selects 10 kinds of plum fruits with the best flavor from nearly 200 kinds of green plums as raw materials. On the other hand, the best of the best can be selected in terms of quality. Among them, the key point is the ripeness rate and integrity rate of plum fruit, the higher the maturity, the more abundant the fruit is fragrant and flavorful, but it will have a higher risk of damage and internal deterioration, therefore, the plum fruit will not hesitate to manpower, not only all manual picking, but also to ensure that 6 times of manual selection, plum fruit to be harmless, pollution-free, no insect bite.
The new Umemi original fruit original brewing series that has just been launched is a 2-year-old handmade single sorghum liquor based on 10 kinds of Chinese native ancient green plums from these four major production areas, and the whole brewing process does not use any additives, and it is aged for more than one year in the pottery jar, the container that can best accommodate the acidity of green plums. In this way, the original fruit is pure soaking, and the plum aroma is slowly extracted at low temperature, with bright fruit aroma and sour taste. Under the infiltration of time, a jar of plum wine with a very Chinese terroir has become natural.