User:Madalibi/History of wine in China

Wine in China has a history of more than 2,000 years.

Prehistory
The history of Chinese grape wine has been dated back more than 4,600 years. In 1995, a joint Sino-USA archeology team including archaeologists from the Archeology Research Institute of Shandong University and American archaeologists under the leadership of Professor Fang Hui (方辉) investigated the two archaeological sites 20 km to the northeast of Rizhao, and discovered the remnants of a variety of alcoholic beverages including grape wine, rice wine, mead, and several mixed beverages of these wines. Out of more than two hundred ceramic pots discovered at the sites, seven were specifically used for grape wine. Remnants of grape seeds were also discovered. If grape wine consumption was once present in Bronze Age China, however, it was replaced by consumption of a range of alcoholic beverages made from sorghum, millet, rice, and fruits such as lychee or Asian plum.

Ancient times
In the 130s and 120s BC, a Chinese imperial envoy of the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) named Zhang Qian opened diplomatic relations with several Central Asian kingdoms, some of which produced grape wine. By the end of the second century BC, Han envoys had brought grape seeds from the wine-loving kingdom of Dayuan (Ferghana in modern Uzbekistan) back to China and had them planted on imperial lands near the capital Chang'an (near modern-day Xi'an in Shaanxi province). The Shennong Bencao Jing, a work on materia medica compiled in the late Han, states that grapes could be used to produce wine. In the Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Wei emperor Cao Pi noted that grape wine "is sweeter than the wine made [from cereals] using ferments and sprouted grain. One recovers from it more easily when one has taken too much." Grapes continued to be grown in the following centuries, notably in the northwestern region of Gansu, but were not used to produce wine on a large scale. Wine thus remained an exotic product known by few people.

Not until the Tang dynasty (618–907) did the consumption of grape wines become more common. Meng Shen's Materia dietetica (Shiliao bencao 食療本草) and the government-sponsored Newly Compiled Materia Medica (Xinxiu bencao 新修本草; 652) records that Tang people produced naturally fermented wine.

After the Tang conquest of Gaochang – an oasis state on the Silk Road located near Turfan in modern Xinjiang –  in 641, China obtained the seeds of an elongated grape called "mare teat" or "horse nipple" (maru 馬乳) and learned from Gaochang a "method of wine making" (jiu fa 酒法). It is not clear, however, whether this method consisted in fermenting grape juice with the yeast naturally found in the fruit's skin, in fermentation of grape juice assisted by a cereal-based ferment, or in the distillation of a brandy-style alcohol from fermented grape juice.

Nevertheless, several Tang poets versified on grape wine, celebrating wine from the "Western Regions" – that from Liangzhou was particularly noted –  or from Taiyuan in Shanxi, the latter of which produced wine made from the "mare teat" grape.

Modern times
China's "first modern winery" was founded in 1892 near the treaty port of Chefoo (now called Yantai) by the overseas Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Bishi.