Recently, the head brand of green plum wine, Umemi, has launched a new series of products "Original Fruit Original Brew".
Umemi's sake brewer wants to make a jar of plum sake called "Original Fruit Brew", and the moment he pours the green plum into a pottery jar with yellow rock sugar and sorghum sake, and ties it with a red cloth, it means at least a year of waiting.
Before the altar is aged, the sorghum wine has been aged for two years. The base sake used in "Original Fruit Original" is a 2-year-old artisanal single sake brew.
Not only that, but as early as 2014, the brewers of Umemi began research on the origin of Chinese green plums and experiments with flavors. They traveled to all the green plum producing areas in the country, conducted continuous research on nearly 200 green plum varieties, and went through more than 1,700 flavor tests before finally selecting the 10 "soul plum varieties".
These green plums are hand-picked from their place of origin and then manually selected six times. The eyes of the sake brewers are like a ruler, and only the green plums that are full and undamaged and have a ripeness rate of more than 90% can be saved to the end and become the raw material for sake brewing.
Within three days, the fresh green plums still with the smell of the mountains and wilderness go through strict cleaning, screening and other processes, these green plums are poured into the pottery jar containing the two-year-old sorghum wine, and then added to the ancient method of yellow rock sugar, without adding any additives, after stirring, and finally sealed the altar for age.
From this moment on, it means the beginning of the butterfly transformation. It's a story of time, of watching and waiting, and it is played out in more than 5,000 pottery altars without interruption. These plum wines will have to wait at least a year before their first prologue is revealed.
Therefore, in the opinion of Mei Jianren, "the biggest cost of making wine is not green plums or sorghum, but time."
When the green plum grows, it absorbs the essence of the sun and the moon. Plums with different aromas, sweetness, and flavors are born in different terroirs, and the different aging times constitute green plums with different personalities, which also bring rich expression to the flavor of plum wine.
During the aging process, the unique flavor of the plum blends with the liquor, and with the accumulation of time and the increase of the vintage, the acidity decreases, and more aromatic substances are produced. Under the "domestication" of time, the wildness of nature is fermented, floated and sunk in the pottery jar, and transformed into a unique oriental flavor inspiration.
For wine lovers, good wine is not afraid to wait.
The longer the plum wine is stored, the more gentle and delicate the body and taste will become. During the long aging process, the flavor of the native green plum and the sorghum wine naturally blend perfectly, transforming into a plum wine with caramel aroma and nutty aroma.
Time is invisible, but there are memories to follow. If you hide your memories in the pottery jar and let time brew, reminiscing about every most important moment of life is full of affection and heart, time will also become a witness of emotions and memories between people.
A glass of green plum wine, throughout the thousands of years of cultural life of the Chinese, behind the endless history and literary beauty, it carries the unique Chinese millennium elegance and extreme romance.