D I Y W I N E

For years, Zheng Tai remembered his uncle making his own wine at home by simply adding grapes to baijiu. Feeling that this wasn’t quite authentic, the 32-year-old resident of Tieling, Liaoning province,decided to try his own luck with grapes that his in-laws grew in their yard.

Zheng is one of many Chinese amateur wine enthusiasts who are making their own vintages at home.Although wineries like to note that China has a 2,000-year history of making wine from grapes—often quoting verses by the famed drunk poet Li Bai—much of this tradition seems to have been based in households, rather than vineyards.In ancient times, people made a variety of alcoholic beverages by fermenting grapes in their houses along with rice, sorghum, wheat,and barley.

Although Zheng says that it’s just a hobby, he believes that his homemade wines are just as good as those he can find for 150 RMB per bottle on the supermarket shelf—and notes that they only cost him 10 RMB per bottle to make.

Sun Changhong, 53-year-old also from Tieling, prefers his wines’sweeter taste to the supermarket’s selections. “It tasted better than wine from a bottle because I made it myself; I felt a sense of achievement,” Sun says. He got into making wine after trying out a former classmate’s home products at a class reunion.

Although Zheng and Sun have had positive experiences, Chinese media has been full of headlines about the dangers of homemade liquors. In 2019, five people died and 14 were hospitalized after a wedding in Yunnan province’s Manpan village, where guests were served homemade wine made with industrial-grade alcohol.

After reading the headlines,Sun has decided to give up his home brews, saying that he was afraid of not being able to control the fermentation conditions and poisoning himself. Zheng remains a committed winemaker, having purchased tools online to make the process easier and cleaner.

“Pay attention to sanitation during the washing process and put in enough sugar to make sure the alcohol percentage is high enough,” he instructs would-be DIY wine-makers. “And never drink a homemade wine that is more than two years old.”

- EMILY CONRAD; ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SUN JIAHUI (孙佳慧)