Wine! Wine is wonderful! Grapes are a special fruit that are incredibly variable. There are so many possibilities, so many different flavors and aromas. There is always something new to find in wines. Tasting wine is a literal academic discipline.
I usually have a glass or two with one meal a day some days. Wine interacts and pairs with foods, and you can even put it in the food!
I’ve grown as a person in the past few years. I’ve suffered many pints of beer trying to fit in with those around me, to not stand out. Beer is their thing, it’s not my thing. I know this now. I know myself now. I know who I am and what I like, and what I like is wine. Also I’m trans. These two things might be related.
I have the same thing happening here with baijiu and huangjiu culture. There is so much variety. Even within the broader styles (like “strong scented”) you can take five bottles from five different distillers in neighbouring villages and have five entirely different experiences. The terroir of the base starch (usually sorghum, but can be almost anything including mixed grains and even sweet potatoes or the like), the precise composition of the “qu” (hard to explain, but basically the part that causes saccharification to occur simultaneously with fermentation), and the nature of the aging process (which again, bizarrely, includes a form of terroir) leads to more diversity than seems plausible for hard liquors.
I’m currently working through this bottle:
It’s a small-distillery (let’s be honest: farmhouse distillery) rustic baijiu from Shandong made of the aforementioned sweet potato with a bit of sorghum to round out its flavour profile a bit, using a primarily wheat-based “big qu”. (Again, hard to explain. If you know what “koji” is for sake, you’ve got the idea, only it’s far, far, far, far, far more convoluted in China.) When I say “rustic” here I mean it. It compares (favourably) to some of the better moonshines I had back in the days when I would go to the USA. When you drink it there’s a pretaste that’s just a little bit sweet and fruity before the main body of it punches you in the palate for a knockout blow of fiercely terroir-driven ethanol and sweet potato. When your palate recovers there’s an interesting, pleasant nutty aftertaste that comes straight from that little bit of sorghum they add. This is a powerful little firebrand (the style is amusingly called “coal gas” in local patois: literally called this on the label!; sort of the Shandong local version of calling something “firewater” or “white lightning”) that you drink neat and chilled, ideally with spicy foods both to help counter the spice (ethanol is great for flushing capsicum from your tongue), and for the spice to help rein in that right hook the main body of the flavour brings.
(Most Chinese liquors are not “sipping” liquors. They’re meal accompaniments and you get truly rewarded if you drink them communally at meals, not alone sipping.)
That sounds lovely. I’ve never tried any Chinese liquors, but I have enjoyed sake on the occasions I’ve tried it. Its probably mostly convenience. Its much easier to find good wine bars and wineries where I tend to be.
Well as the old saying goes: if you’ve tried a Chinese liquor, you’ve tried … ah … that specific … Chinese liquor.
It’s crazy how much diversity there is here. I mean there’s 12 official styles of baijiu alone. And that doesn’t even begin to rein in the craziness of classification. Thousands of years of booze culture with a society that is VERY strict on tradition leads to fractal complexity.
(Irrelevant side note: I brought a dear friend in Canada some “Luzhou” style—more properly termed “strong scented” in modern classification, but this was from Luzhou proper—hooch. This friend, like me, has a long history of trying different liquors from different places and has an equally broad palate as a result, but by virtue of my location I have access to stuff he’s never heard of. His description of the Luzhou style stuff was “it tastes exactly like I would imagine diesel would taste like if diesel tasted really good”.)
Wine! Wine is wonderful! Grapes are a special fruit that are incredibly variable. There are so many possibilities, so many different flavors and aromas. There is always something new to find in wines. Tasting wine is a literal academic discipline.
I usually have a glass or two with one meal a day some days. Wine interacts and pairs with foods, and you can even put it in the food!
I’ve grown as a person in the past few years. I’ve suffered many pints of beer trying to fit in with those around me, to not stand out. Beer is their thing, it’s not my thing. I know this now. I know myself now. I know who I am and what I like, and what I like is wine. Also I’m trans. These two things might be related.
I have the same thing happening here with baijiu and huangjiu culture. There is so much variety. Even within the broader styles (like “strong scented”) you can take five bottles from five different distillers in neighbouring villages and have five entirely different experiences. The terroir of the base starch (usually sorghum, but can be almost anything including mixed grains and even sweet potatoes or the like), the precise composition of the “qu” (hard to explain, but basically the part that causes saccharification to occur simultaneously with fermentation), and the nature of the aging process (which again, bizarrely, includes a form of terroir) leads to more diversity than seems plausible for hard liquors.
I’m currently working through this bottle:
It’s a small-distillery (let’s be honest: farmhouse distillery) rustic baijiu from Shandong made of the aforementioned sweet potato with a bit of sorghum to round out its flavour profile a bit, using a primarily wheat-based “big qu”. (Again, hard to explain. If you know what “koji” is for sake, you’ve got the idea, only it’s far, far, far, far, far more convoluted in China.) When I say “rustic” here I mean it. It compares (favourably) to some of the better moonshines I had back in the days when I would go to the USA. When you drink it there’s a pretaste that’s just a little bit sweet and fruity before the main body of it punches you in the palate for a knockout blow of fiercely terroir-driven ethanol and sweet potato. When your palate recovers there’s an interesting, pleasant nutty aftertaste that comes straight from that little bit of sorghum they add. This is a powerful little firebrand (the style is amusingly called “coal gas” in local patois: literally called this on the label!; sort of the Shandong local version of calling something “firewater” or “white lightning”) that you drink neat and chilled, ideally with spicy foods both to help counter the spice (ethanol is great for flushing capsicum from your tongue), and for the spice to help rein in that right hook the main body of the flavour brings.
(Most Chinese liquors are not “sipping” liquors. They’re meal accompaniments and you get truly rewarded if you drink them communally at meals, not alone sipping.)
Do you have a recommendation for an entry level baijiu available in the US?
That sounds lovely. I’ve never tried any Chinese liquors, but I have enjoyed sake on the occasions I’ve tried it. Its probably mostly convenience. Its much easier to find good wine bars and wineries where I tend to be.
Well as the old saying goes: if you’ve tried a Chinese liquor, you’ve tried … ah … that specific … Chinese liquor.
It’s crazy how much diversity there is here. I mean there’s 12 official styles of baijiu alone. And that doesn’t even begin to rein in the craziness of classification. Thousands of years of booze culture with a society that is VERY strict on tradition leads to fractal complexity.
(Irrelevant side note: I brought a dear friend in Canada some “Luzhou” style—more properly termed “strong scented” in modern classification, but this was from Luzhou proper—hooch. This friend, like me, has a long history of trying different liquors from different places and has an equally broad palate as a result, but by virtue of my location I have access to stuff he’s never heard of. His description of the Luzhou style stuff was “it tastes exactly like I would imagine diesel would taste like if diesel tasted really good”.)
I’m going to try some… specific… Chinese liquors some day. I always enjoy trying new things!