First, yellow rice wine brewing raw materials:
Yellow rice wine is a kind of wine brewed with grain and wheat koji or Xiaoqu as saccharifying starter. In history, the raw material for producing yellow rice wine was millet (scientific name: Setaria italica, which was the general name of glutinous rice, sorghum, millet and millet in ancient times, sometimes called Liang, and now it is also called millet, millet after hulling). In the south, rice (especially glutinous rice) is widely used as raw material for brewing yellow rice wine. Since the Song Dynasty, the political, cultural and economic centers have moved south, and the production of yellow rice wine is limited to several southern provinces. The production of shochu began in the Southern Song Dynasty, and it became popular in the North in the Yuan Dynasty. The output of yellow rice wine in the north is gradually shrinking, and drinking soju in the south is not as common as that in the north. In the south, the production of yellow rice wine was preserved. During the Qing Dynasty, Shaoxing yellow rice wine in the south dominated both at home and abroad. At present, rice wine production is mainly concentrated in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Anhui and other places, with a small amount of production in Shandong, Shaanxi and Dalian.
Second, the name of yellow rice wine
Yellow rice wine belongs to brewing wine, and its alcohol content is generally around 15 degrees.
Yellow rice wine, as its name implies, is yellow rice wine. So some people translated the name of yellow rice wine into "yellow rice wine". In fact, this is not appropriate. The color of rice wine is not always yellow. In ancient times, when the filtration technology of wine was not mature, wine was turbid, which was called "white wine" or turbid wine at that time. The color of yellow rice wine is black and red even now, which can't be understood literally. The essence of rice wine should be made of grain, and it is more appropriate to call it "rice wine" because it can represent grain. Nowadays, "yellow rice wine" is widely used to represent yellow rice wine.
In modern times, yellow rice wine is the general name of grain-brewed wine. Liquor brewed from grain (excluding distilled liquor) can be classified as yellow rice wine. Although yellow rice wine is the general name of grain-brewed wine, some folk areas still retain some traditional names of local brewed and sold wines, such as Jiangxi Shuijiu, Shaanxi Thick Wine, Tibet Highland Barley Wine and so on. If they insist on yellow rice wine, the locals may not accept it.
In ancient times, "wine" was the general term for all wines. In the historical period before the emergence of distilled liquor, "wine" was brewing. After distilled shochu appeared, it became more complicated. The name "wine" is not only the general name of all wines, but also the general name of grain-brewed wines on some occasions. For example, in Compendium of Materia Medica, Li Shizhen divided the liquor into three categories: liquor, shochu and liquor. Among them, the "wine" part is all the wine brewed by grain. Since wine is not only the general name of all wines, but also the general name of grain-brewed wine, after all, there should be a general name that only includes grain-brewed wine. Therefore, it is not accidental that yellow rice wine appears as a special name for grain brewing wine.
"Yellow rice wine" in Ming Dynasty may refer to rice wine with long brewing time and deep color, which is different from "white wine". The "white wine" of the Ming Dynasty is not distilled shochu now. For example, there was "Sanjiu Liquor" in the Ming Dynasty, which was brewed with white rice, white koji and white water, and the brewing time was short. The wine is cloudy and white. The formation of yellow (or dark brown) of wine is mainly due to Maillard reaction between sugar and amino acids during cooking or storage of wine, resulting in pigment. There are also some pigments made of caramel (called "sugar color") to deepen its color. There is a sentence in the eleven volumes of "Holding the Moon" edited by Dai in Ming Dynasty: "Where yellow wine and white wine are added with less soju, it will not be sour overnight." From this formulation, we can clearly see the difference between yellow wine, white wine and shochu. Yellow rice wine refers to old wine with long brewing time, and white wine refers to rice wine with short brewing time (generally, white koji, that is, rice koji, is used as saccharifying starter). In the Ming dynasty, the specificity of the name yellow rice wine was not very strict. Although it can't contain all the grain-brewed wines, at least large-scale wines brewed in southern China can be included in the brewing process. In the Qing Dynasty, although the production of brewing wine was retained in various places, Shaoxing's old wine and rice wine were popular all over the country. This kind of wine was sold all over the country at that time, with high quality and dark color, which may have something to do with the final establishment of the name "yellow rice wine". Because the Qing emperor had a special interest in Shaoxing wine. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a saying that "soju was forbidden and yellow rice wine was forbidden". By the time of the Republic of China, yellow rice wine as the general name of grain brewing wine had been basically determined. Yellow rice wine belongs to local wine (domestic wine is called local wine to show that it corresponds to foreign wine in Borapin).
The development of brewing technology in China can be divided into two stages. The first stage is natural fermentation, which has gone through thousands of years, and the traditional fermentation technology has developed from gestation to maturity. Even in modern times, natural fermentation technology has not completely disappeared. Some of these mysteries remain to be solved. People mainly make wine by experience, and the production scale is generally small, which is basically manual operation. There is no reliable detection index to ensure the quality of wine.
Other distilled liquor brewed in ancient China, wine brewed in ancient China, beer brewed in ancient China, medicinal liquor brewed in ancient China and tonic wine are as follows: