Xinghuacun: The Jars of Fenjiu

Xinghuacun means apricot blossom village, and it is a town in Fenyang, a county-level city administered by Lüliang, in the eastern part of the prefecture. The distillery that carries the name, Shanxi Xinghuacun Fenjiu, was founded in 1949 on the foundation of the Jinyu Fenjiu Corporation set up in 1919, one of the first modern distilleries in the country. Its plant covers more than 4,500 mu in the town, and it draws grain from bases in the north-east, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Hebei as well as from Shanxi. Inside the plant, the Fenjiu Museum opened in October 1993.

The grain is sorghum, not rice, and that choice explains the taste. It is ground, soaked, cooked and cooled, then mixed with a qu made from barley and peas, the starter that turns starch into sugar and sugar into spirit. The mixture goes into earthen jars, where it ferments for a month before the first distillation. What comes off the still is a spirit with noticeable ethyl acetate and ethyl lactate, which is what the style is built on: a light aroma that people describe as floral, herby, or like stone fruit. Nothing in the process is quick; the month in the jar is the first of several waits.

After the first distillation the spent grain is not thrown away. It is mixed with qu again, fermented for another month and distilled a second time, and only then discarded, the two spirits blended and left to age, usually for about a year, before a final blend, proofing and bottling. In 1952 the National Alcohol Appraisal Conference rated Fenjiu one of the four famous spirits, and the company is one of the drafters of the national standard for light-aroma baijiu. It listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 6 January 1994, the first baijiu company to do so, and by 2023 the brand was ranked the third most valuable spirits brand in the world.