A morning in a Shaoxing yellow-wine cellar

We heard the cellar before we saw it. A low, almost subaural ticking, slightly irregular, the sound of gas escaping from beneath sealed lids of woven bamboo and lotus leaf. It carried up the stone steps from the underground chamber on Bayi Road and reached us in the courtyard above before our eyes had adjusted to the shade. Shen Shifu, the head brewer, was standing at the head of the stairs with a small tin lamp in one hand, waiting for the four of us to stop talking. He did not introduce himself. He held up the lamp and tilted his head toward the dark, and we understood that the cellar was already in conversation with itself and we had been asked, politely, to listen.

The chamber is older than the building that sits on top of it. The brick vaults were laid in the Wanli reign of the Ming, around 1582, when this corner of Shaoxing held a guild of wine merchants who shipped huangjiu down the canal to Hangzhou and from there to the imperial court. The arches are low enough that we had to bow walking through them. Along the walls sat rows of large earthen jars, each about chest-high, sealed with the bamboo-and-leaf lid that gives the cellar its sound. Some jars were dated in red brush. The oldest we could read was 1978. Shen told us, without ceremony, that the cellar holds 312 jars in active fermentation and that he can name the year and grain source of every one.

Shen is sixty-one. He apprenticed at fourteen under his maternal uncle, who apprenticed under a man called Old Mao who lost his hearing in the cellar from forty years of leaning in to listen, and who, Shen said, could still tell a slow fermentation from a stuck one by placing his palm against the side of a jar. The lineage runs back through five generations of brewers at this address, though the cellar itself has outlasted at least three companies, two wars, and the collectivisation of 1956. Shen keeps a brown clothbound ledger in the office upstairs in which he records, each morning, the temperature at four points in the cellar, the humidity, the day's reading from a barometer his uncle bought in 1971, and a single character for each of the jars he has opened, listened to, or refilled. The character is shorthand for the jar's mood. He showed us the page for the day before. There were eighty-three entries.

“It was sharp and slightly medicinal, closer to a herbalist's drawer than to bread, with a sweetness underneath that arrived only on the second breath.”

A jar of Shaoxing huangjiu begins with three things and a long argument between them. The grain is glutinous rice from a paddy belt south of the city that has been growing the same variety, Jiazao, since before the Qing. The water comes from Jian Lake, which Shen said tastes faintly of the limestone bed under it and which the brewers here will not substitute. The third element is the wheat-and-herb starter, jiuyao, a brick of mould and bacteria that the cellar inherits from itself, a continuous culture that has been propagated since at least the early Republic. Shen broke off a piece for us to smell. It was sharp and slightly medicinal, closer to a herbalist's drawer than to bread, with a sweetness underneath that arrived only on the second breath. The starter, he said, is the cellar's memory of every previous winter. If it dies, the cellar becomes another cellar.

He led us to a jar in the third row that had been sealed in the winter of 2019. He cracked the lid by sliding a thin bamboo wedge along the rim, lifted it half an inch, and held the lamp close. The smell that rose was not what we had expected. We had read that aged huangjiu turned amber and smoky, like a dry sherry, and the colour through the lamp was indeed the colour of dark honey. But the smell was quieter than that. It was rice and slate and a faint note of dried longan, with something underneath that we eventually agreed sounded, if a smell can sound like anything, like the inside of an old wooden chest. Shen lowered his ear to the rim. He listened for perhaps thirty seconds. He said the jar was finishing its winter, that the small bubbles he could hear were tighter than they had been in March, and that it would be ready to draw off in the next moon. He resealed the lid with a press of his palm.

We asked, the way one asks, whether the craft was at risk. He thought about it and did not answer the question we had asked. He said that the city had built a new museum of yellow wine three streets over, and that visitors there were shown a film and given a small cup of one-year-old wine and sent on their way, and this was not a bad thing. He said that two of the larger producers in Shaoxing had switched to temperature-controlled stainless tanks for export, and that the wine that came out of those tanks was clean and reliable and tasted of itself, by which he meant of nothing in particular. The cellar on Bayi Road, he said, was small. It produced perhaps eight thousand jin a year. The buyers were old families in the city, two restaurants in Hangzhou, a calligrapher in Suzhou who used the lees for ink, and an apothecary in Ningbo who steeped roots in it. The work continued because those buyers continued. When the buyers stopped, the cellar would stop, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

Before we left he opened a second jar, from 1996, the year his daughter was born. He poured a thimble each. The wine was darker than the first, almost the colour of black tea, and it arrived in three parts: a soft round sweetness, then a dry minerality that we eventually placed as the lake water under it, then, after a pause, a returning warmth at the back of the throat that tasted faintly of dried mushroom and something we did not have a word for. He held his cup at eye level and did not drink. He said his daughter lived in Shanghai now and worked at a bank and visited at the autumn festival, and that he had not yet decided which jar she would take with her when he stopped coming down the stairs. Above us, on the street, a delivery scooter passed. The cellar ticked on at its own slow rate, and Shen, after a while, drank his cup.