The Origin of China Wine

Apes collect wild fruits for a living and are good at hiding them. In nature, the growth of fruit is strictly seasonal, so it often needs to be stored. In the wild times, apes hid temporarily inedible fruits in caves and caves. Over time, the fruit rotted, and the wild fruit with sugar was naturally fermented by wild yeast in nature, resulting in alcohol and wine slurry, which led to legends such as "Apes make wine with wonderful flowers" and "Taste ape wine in the deep rock". ? [ 1]?

This is recorded in many ancient books in China. Zhou Danguang and Li Rihua, scholars of Ming Dynasty, all mentioned the story of Huangshan ape brewing wine. Li wow wrote with a voice:

Huangshan is full of apes. Collect miscellaneous flowers and fruits in Shi 'ao in spring and summer to make wine. The fragrance is overflowing and smells hundreds of steps. Those who go deep into wild firewood may drink it secretly, not too much, that is, to reduce the traces of wine. If you feel it, the person who wipes it will die (ni8o).

Coincidentally, Li, a scholar in Qing Dynasty, recorded the story of Guangdong and Guangxi ape-man brewing wine in Notes on East Guangdong, and Lu Zuofan brewing wine in Notes on West Guangdong. Li wrote:

Qiongzhou (now Hainan Island) is full of children ... I tasted ape wine in the depths of the rock. Gai ape is made of rice mixed with flowers. A cave needs five or six liters of wine, which is the hottest, but extremely rare.

Lu Zuofan wrote:

There are many apes in Fushan, such as Pingle in western Guangdong, and they are good at picking flowers and making wine. The woodcutter has a nest in the mountains, and his wine is as abundant as a hundred stones. If you drink it, it smells abnormal. It's called ape wine.

Apes can not only make wine, but also drink. The Supplement to the National History written by Li Zhao in the Tang Dynasty has a wonderful record of how humans catch clever apes (that is, "orangutans"):

Orangutans drink good wine and good wine, and people take it, so they put two things to lure them. At the first sight of it, the orangutan will curse the sun: "seduce me!" " "I have never been far away, but I have been back for a long time. I was a little persuaded, and soon I got drunk and tripped. Because I get it. ? Apes are very alert animals. They live in deep mountains and wild forests, jumping and climbing between rocks and trees, and it is difficult to capture them alive. After careful observation, people found and mastered a fatal weakness of apes, that is, "good wine." The cartoon "Monkeys Catch the Moon" vividly shows this process. People put several jars of sweet and rich wine in places where monkeys haunt. When the monkey smelled the fragrance, he hesitated in front of the wine jar, then carefully dipped his finger in the wine and tasted it. After a long time, I didn't find anything suspicious. Finally, I couldn't resist the temptation of sweet wine and drank it to my heart's content until I was as drunk as a fiddler and was caught. This method of catching apes is not unique to China. People in Southeast Asia and indigenous people in Africa also use similar methods to catch apes or gorillas. Thus, apes are often associated with wine.

These records of different times and authors can at least prove the fact that many things similar to "wine" have been found in the colony of apes. As for how this kind of "wine" is produced, whether it is an instinctive activity of pure biological adaptation or a conscious and planned production activity of apes, it is worth studying. To explain this phenomenon, we have to start with the formation principle of wine.

Wine is a fermented food, which is produced by a microorganism called yeast to decompose sugar. Yeast is a widely distributed fungus, which is easy to reproduce and grow in meta leaves, especially in some fruits with high enamel content. Sugary fruit is an important food for apes. It is a natural phenomenon that mature wild fruits are produced by yeasts on the peel or in the air when they fall. In our daily life, we can often smell the smell of wine floating near rotten fruit stalls and even garbage dumps. In the season when fruits are ripe, apes collect and store a lot of fruits in Shi Wa, and the accumulated fruits are fermented by drunken mother bacteria in nature, and the liquid of "wine" is separated in Shi Wa. This result did not affect the consumption of fruit, and the separated liquid-"wine" had a special flavor for enjoyment. It is logical and reasonable that apes can unconsciously "make" wine. Of course, it is a long process to feel "brewing into wine" from the initial mouth of fermented wild fruit. How long will it last? No one can tell.

Through archaeological excavations, wine has been found in Shang bronzes three or four thousand years ago. Through the excavation of primitive cultural sites in China, we can know more clearly that both the early Yangshao culture, the later Longshan culture and Gu Liang culture have found pottery for holding wine, some of which are very exquisite, and also unearthed jars for brewing. This shows that there was wine in China long before the era of Yidi and Du Kang. In the late Shang Dynasty, the legendary ancestor Yi Di or Du Kang may have further improved the brewing technology on the basis of predecessors, increased the alcohol content of the wine, and made it more sweet and rich, so that the initial brewing gradually evolved into a conscious and purposeful brewing activity of human beings and became a conscious production behavior.

It should be said that ancient wine was naturally "alcoholized" by food in nature. As we all know, wine must be an alcoholic beverage. Sugar in food, such as maltose and glucose, will be fermented by yeast to produce alcohol in nature. Those wild fruits rich in sugar, under the action of yeast, produce alcohol through natural fermentation, which becomes "wine". This phenomenon of natural wine is very common in people's daily life. An example is the entry about "pear wine" in Zhou Mi's Return to the Heart and Miscellaneous Knowledge in the Southern Song Dynasty.