Rice is the most widely consumed in the world, but it is not the most used food for winemaking, but when it comes to which grain has the longest history of being used for winemaking, it must be said that it is rice. Moreover, rice is still one of the main food types widely used in winemaking around the world. Today, Mijiujun will first talk to you about what kind of wine is still brewed with rice? Rice wine is made from glutinous rice and is therefore not covered by this article.
Rice, also known as rice, is the most widely eaten among the grains. The history of the Chinese people using rice as their main food is said to date back to the Hemudu civilization more than 7,000 years ago. Rice is rich in starchy carbohydrates, gluten, fat, according to the chinese medicine to feed the cultural interpretation, rice into the spleen, stomach, lung meridian, has the effect of tonifying the qi, nourishing the yin and moisturizing the lungs, strengthening the spleen and stomach, and eliminating irritability and thirst. Therefore, it can be used as the main food of human beings, and it can also be used as the main raw material for winemaking.
Although the history of human winemaking with rice has been unfounded, the tradition of brewing wine with rice as the main raw material has been preserved to this day, which mainly includes Chinese rice-flavored liquor, soy-flavored liquor, special-flavored liquor, and Japanese shochu, and the most popular representative brands in the Chinese market are Guilin Sanhua and Meizhou Changle-yaki of rice-flavored liquor, Yubing yaki of soy-scented liquor, si special liquor of special flavor, and otter festival of Japanese sake.
The most typical rice brewing is naturally rice-flavored liquor. Rice-flavored liquor is one of the four major aromatic types of liquor established in China, and its production and marketing scale and market impact can be seen. Although with the development of the liquor industry and changes in market competition, the production and sales scale of rice-flavored liquor is shrinking, it is very popular in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Fujian, Taiwan and other regions of origin, and there are still nearly 200,000 tons of production and sales every year.
Guangxi rice-flavored liquor Guilin Sanhua wine
Sanhua liquor produced in Guilin, Guangxi, is one of the typical representatives of rice-flavored liquor, and is also one of the world-famous Guilin Three Treasures, known as Guilin Moutai.
Sanhua sake uses rice as the main raw material, Koji as the starter, solid fermentation in the early stage to expand the cultivation of bacteria and saccharification, liquid fermentation in the later stage, liquid distillation, and then aged in caves with clay pots. Sanhua wine also has different quality grades, the high quality of sanhua wine, in the rice aroma contains a honey sweetness, which is a high-quality rice flavored wine after aging the typical style. If it is explained in a professional way, it is based on β-phenethyl ethanol and ethyl lactate as the main incense, which has the characteristics of a typical rice flavor style.
Regarding the origin of the name of Sanhua wine, there are two theories: one is that it is steamed three times during brewing, and the liquor is flooded with several layers of fine hops when it is shaken, so it is also called "three boiling heap flower wine", which is said to be exquisite; one refers to the "Li Shui Hua" of the Li River water used in brewing Sanhua Wine, the "Hedao Flower" of high-quality rice, and the "Yerba Buena Flower" of Guilin Vanilla used in the wine song, which means that the Sanhua Wine takes the essence of Guilin Heaven and Earth, which has typical ecological characteristics.
Guangdong rice-flavored liquor Meizhou Changle roast
The rice-flavored liquor produced in Guangdong has different terroirs and different techniques, and it naturally has a different taste compared with the Guilin Sanhua liquor in Guangxi. Meizhou Changle Shochu, known as the first cellar in the southern country, is a typical representative of Guangdong rice-flavored liquor.
Meizhou was a Hakka settlement, and it is said that at the end of the Qin Dynasty, the Qin state sent an army of 50,000 people from the Central Plains to conquer Lingnan. After the fall of the Qin State, this army and people took root in Lingnan and lived here for generations, making a living from farming. In Wuhua County, where Changle shochu is brewed, the Hakka are particularly concentrated.
The beauty of Qing'an, from the Qi, Meizhou Hakka with rice winemaking has a long history, its rice-flavored winemaking skills have been developed and matured in the Ming Dynasty, becoming the Hakka's main wine. Born in Si and raised in Si, Changle Shochu is therefore regarded by the Hakka as a sustenance for nostalgia. Wuhua is also the hometown of overseas Chinese, and many Hakka people have moved overseas from Wuhua, which has also driven the export of Guangdong rice-flavored liquor to international markets such as Southeast Asia.
Changle yaki is made with refined rice as the raw material and secret cake koji as the fermentation agent, and is brewed by traditional brewing techniques such as steaming, fermentation, distillation, and cellaring. Changle shochu is based on the typical style of rice-flavored liquor, the rice is elegant, the entrance is sweet and mellow, and the characteristics are more prominent, so the personality of Guilin Sanhua liquor is extremely obvious in flavor.
In recent years, the Sanhua liquor market in Guilin has been declining, making people sigh, and Changle shochu is also constantly striving to achieve rejuvenation with its location advantages in Guangdong and the influence of Hakka culture in the global Chinese.
Soy sauce type liquor jade ice roast
In Foshan, Guangdong Province, there is also a liquor category with rice as the main raw material, but with a very different style - soy sauce type liquor. The first half of the soy sauce type liquor brewing process is similar to the rice-flavored liquor, but after brewing the rice-flavored liquor, it is also necessary to soak the fat pork, and then aged and stored, thus forming a unique soy sauce flavor, the wine body is colorless or slightly yellowish, jade clean and ice clear. Therefore, the soy sauce type liquor is similar to the rice-flavored liquor in terms of flavor characteristics, but it also has the aroma of aged meat with obvious fat oxidation, commonly known as "oil ha flavor", and it is softer than the rice-flavored liquor and the aroma is more durable.
The typical representative of soy-scented liquor is the historical liquor Yu Bingyao. The origin of the name of Yu bingyao, as the name suggests, because the lard of fat pork resembles white jade, and it is cold and cold to the touch, so it is named Yu bingyao. Generally speaking, a piece of pork can be used for many years, so some soy sauce-type liquor factories will also say that it is "aged meat soaking" when introducing its brewing techniques.
The use of animal meat into wine has a very long history in China. As early as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, a kind of lamb wine was popular in the northern region, that is, mutton and mutton fat were soaked in rice milk during winemaking, and the meat aroma was mixed into the flavor wine in the process of saccharification and fermentation of rice milk through the fermentation of koji tillers, or the mutton and mutton fat were immersed in the finished wine to make a prepared wine to form a meat-flavored wine. In the Song Dynasty, lamb wine became more and more prosperous, but because of the high cost of consumption, it mainly met the needs of medium and high-end consumption and military kitchens, and civilian sales were less.
Yubing shochu has a long history, in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, it became one of the most influential liquor brands at that time with factors such as special brewing skills, profound cultural heritage, excellent quality, and great influence in domestic and foreign markets. However, with the passage of time, soy sauce-type liquor lags behind the industry average in terms of industrial upgrading and quality improvement, so it is little known. However, in Guangdong, Southeast Asia, and in the global Chinese circles, soy sauce liquor still has a certain consumption base, and the annual output is said to be about 200,000 tons.
Special flavor type liquor Jiangxi four special wine
Rice is the main raw material for brewing, and most of them are brewed by using koji as a saccharification and starter, and using liquid and semi-solid fermentation and liquid distillation. In Yichun in central Jiangxi, there is a four special wine, which uses medium and high temperature Daqu as a saccharification and fermentation agent, and the winemaking technology adopts solid fermentation and solid distillation.
From the perspective of the historical inheritance of wine culture, Jiangxi is also the main production and marketing area of rice-flavored liquor, and the brewing process of the four special liquors should be based on the brewing technology of rice-flavored liquor, and the superior technology of Daqu liquor brewing has been introduced, thereby improving the high-quality rate of rice brewing.
Also with rice as the main raw material, the saccharification of rice-flavored liquor and the fermentation agent are specially made of koji, while the four special liquors use the medium and high temperature daiko used to brew high-quality sauce liquor. Rice-flavored liquor uses pottery jars and stainless steel tanks as fermentation containers, while Si te liquor uses red ochre stone cellars as fermentation containers, which come from Longhu Mountain in Red Eagle Pond, like mud and not mud and not stone, so that a small winemaking ecology with a unique microbiome is formed in the cellar pond. The fermentation cycle of liquor is 54 days, which is similar to the fermentation time of Daqu sake, but it is much longer than rice-flavored liquor.
The same raw materials will produce different flavors of sake due to different brewing techniques, while the flavored liquor of Shitejiu and the rice-flavored liquor are very different, but they are obviously different from Daqu liquor, which uses sorghum as the main raw material. But because of this too special personality, the four special wines have been underestimated in history.
Until 1988, a team of liquor experts led by baijiu titan Zhou Henggang (deceased) and Shen Yifang (deceased) gathered at the Site Distillery to conduct a field investigation, and found that the process of Sitejiu was extremely special, and from the winemaking process, the fundamental reason why Sitejiu had three flavors of strong, clear and sauce but did not rely on them. At the Fifth National Wine Appraisal Conference the following year, Si Special Wine was selected as a national famous wine with the unique category of "special aroma type", becoming the only famous wine brand in the national famous wine camp with rice as the main raw material.
So where is the four special wines? Just said that it has both strong, clear, sauce three kinds of flavor of flavor, specifically, is the "thick head sauce tail clear middle": the entrance has a high-quality and fragrant sweetness, fine tasting, fragrant refreshing clean full of fresh fragrance, I think it is like the honey aroma of rice-flavored liquor, aftertaste of the wine, and there is a caramelized aroma in the sauce, and I have to make people shoot the case.
However, the origin of the name of the four special wines has nothing to do with its special style of "three not relying on". It is said that the Zhangzhou area in Yichun, Jiangxi Province, has been famous for its abundant wine since ancient times, especially after 1915, when the whole country set off a wave of industrial salvation, there were many wineries and fierce competition. But there is a "Lou Yuanlong" winemaking workshop that is the most famous. In 1930, the owner of "Lou Yuanlong" posted two "special" words on his own wine altar, one is to indicate that his own wine is more special than other styles, and the other is to facilitate consumers to identify the true and false. On the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Dapeng trademark was added and four "special" characters were marked to show better.
Japanese Famous Sake Festival
China's rice as the main raw material winemaking history is very long, from the perspective of the history of the development of winemaking technology, China's rice brewing is rich in variety, excellent quality, but compared with Japanese sake, shochu, there are also their own shortcomings, especially in marketing worth learning from Japanese counterparts.
The art of making sake in Japan comes from the chinese tradition, which is the public opinion of history, and there is no doubt about it. And Japan's sake is the national wine, and the cultural self-confidence in this glass of sake is worth learning. It is said that Japan originally only had "turbid sake", no "sake", so the addition of charcoal to precipitate the turbidity in the wine, the liquor became clear, but the Japanese sake is developed from the brewing technology of rice wine, and there is innovation and development, so as to form its own system, so this statement lacks the historical logic of development coherence.
However, sake uses rice as raw material, but it has developed a classification and grading system that is different from China's liquor, and is roughly divided into pure rice brewing, ordinary brewing, increased brewing, ben brewing, yin brewing, etc. according to the production method, of which Daigin brewing is the top level, known as the "King of Sake". The most famous daigin brew in the Chinese market is a brand called "Otter Festival".
The term otter sacrifice comes from the Chinese classic "Li Ji Yue Ling" (礼記月令), "The east wind thaws, the stinging insects begin to vibrate, the fish on the ice, and the otter sacrifices the fish", which means that when winter comes to spring, otters line up the fish caught on the shore, like sacrificial offerings. The Japanese sake brewer's name has two meanings: one is to mark the provenance of the inheritance of sake culture, which is the expression of cultural identity; the other is to give a solemn sense of ceremony to the refined brewing technique.
In fact, compared to Chinese rice brewing, Japanese sake is known for its exquisite craftsmanship. For example, the otter festival also has a typical and prominent rice aroma, but its refined brewing gives the wine a fresh fruity aroma, which has both personality and a sense of exquisite life experience, and also gives consumers a reason to buy at a high price.
So how sophisticated is The Japanese sake brewing technique? In terms of the treatment of raw rice alone, the packaging of daigin is marked with a degree of polish, because the rice used in daigin is shaved off the skin when brewing, leaving the rice heart, and the polished rice degree refers to the residual degree of the rice heart after the skin of the rice is shaved. Generally speaking, the rice refining of Daigin sake is about 50%, and the quality is 39%, while the otter festival can achieve 23% of the polished rice.
So what is the impact of polished rice on the quality of rice winemaking? According to sake brewers, rice has a higher quality of heart starch and is the highest quality raw material for sake brewing, while the higher epidermal protein content inhibits and affects fermentation.
However, looking back at the history of the development of Japanese sake, since the Meiji Restoration, it has experienced a period of low development and is not welcomed by the Chinese people, and its scene is roughly similar to that of young people in China who think that liquor is not fashionable. Affected by market factors, the industrial level and product quality of sake have also declined. Especially during World War II, wine merchants mixed a lot of edible alcohol into sake to make huge profits, but sake lost its original appearance and was regarded as the "wine of chaos".
Later, with the return of Japanese national self-confidence and the efforts of the sake industry itself, sake was continuously innovated by introducing modern science and technology (such as rice polishing machines) on the basis of restoring traditional sake brewing techniques, and finally restored the status of national liquor, which was loved by the majority of Japanese consumers.
All in all, a single grain of rice can produce different flavors of sake, and although the region and culture belong differently, the price is different, but it is also the best of its own. If you were a wine lover, which one would you prefer?