Explore the beauty of Wuliangye 丨Taste the fragrance of the great country in the flow of time

Mondo Gastronomy Updated on 2024-02-29

Every gram of cellar mud here contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms, and the value is much higher than the same weight! In the first month of Yibin Gulou Street, along with the smoke of Shangyong that has not disappeared for hundreds of years, the Yuanming Ancient Cellar Pond Group of Wuliangye 501 Workshop ushered in the first wave of visitors in the New Year of the Dragon - more than 30 provincial mainstream party media representatives and well-known scholars. The guests who participated in the provincial mainstream party media "China Wine King" New Year Gathering walked into the earliest, most complete and longest continuous use of the crypt-style koji wine fermentation cellar in China, felt the weight of more than 700 years, explored why the strong fragrance of the great country has been passed down to this day, and experienced the charm of Hemei Wuliang.

Thousands of years of wine history and more than 700 years of living inheritance.

Fifty years, the new mash god, the fragrance of thousands of homes, the majestic square in front of you, the reputation of the United States, the great cause;

Seven hundred years, the old retort and old cellar, the scale is difficult to regain, and now Mimimi five grains, raising the voice of Yudian, into a great achievement.

Standing on the bluestone road of Gulou Street, Wang Shan, executive vice president of the Chinese Poetry Society, looked up at a couplet carved on the door of the Changfa Sheng Liquor Workshop, smelling the strong aroma of wine from the antique old workshop, and couldn't help but sigh: "Thinking for thousands of years, wine becomes a thousand things, a couplet, and the weather is thousands." ”

Stepping over the wooden threshold, time seems to be turned back centuries.

There are wooden structural frames, wooden shovels, wooden steaming pots, and wicker weaving ...... for retorts

Nowadays, these traditional winemaking tools are rare. The on-site narrator mentioned that in order to protect the internal ecology of the ancient cellar and ensure the quality of the wine, the traditional wine-making techniques and tools have been retained by successive generations of Wuliangye craftsmen.

From cellaring, spoiling, mixing to distillation, picking ......One move, one style, pure manual operation, every step must be carefully controlled, and there is no room for negligence. The brewer explained the main points as he worked.

Here, it is difficult to find traces of mechanization. *After looking around the Wuliangye Liquor Ancient Distillery, the guests found that there is still the layout and style of "front shop and back shop", which is the appearance of the workshop since its establishment, and it is also the purest original memory of Chinese liquor, witnessing and experiencing the origin and development of Chinese liquor, and silently guarding the inheritance and promotion of the material heritage of the Chinese nation.

As early as 1964, the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics Management Committee had investigated and identified the "Changfa Sheng" ancient wine shop. Since then, Wuliangye has carried out many archaeological explorations on ancient wineries such as "Lichuan Yong" and "Changfa Sheng", unearthed a number of rich relics and relics, and won many honors such as provincial and national cultural relics protection units.

On August 8, 2020, under the guidance of the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics and sponsored by the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the "Archaeological Wuliangye" project was launched, which lasted 18 months, and found 36 ash pits, 11 cellar ponds, 6 house sites, 16 water ditches, 8 stoves and Ming Dynasty city walls, drying halls, wine retort bases and other liquor production activities in the ruins of the burning room near the old workshop of Wuliangye Changfa Sheng, which unearthed a large number of wine utensils and wine vessels in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, which is the most complete production factor found in China so farThe largest distilled liquor brewing site basically clarifies the development history of Yibin distilled liquor represented by "Wuliangye" from the Yuan to the Qing Dynasty, and fully confirms that the history of the ancient cellar pools of Wuliangye can be traced back to the Yuan Dynasty, which has been more than 700 years ago.

Traditional ingenuity guards the blessing of modern technology.

The brewing of liquor is a bioengineering, and microorganisms are the key to brewing liquor, which is known as the "invisible brewer" by the industry. As the core carrier of the fermentation of strong flavor liquor, the cellar is also the most important cradle carrier for the growth of liquor microorganisms, which has a crucial impact on the quality and taste of liquor.

After a long-term and slow biological reaction, it participates in the synthesis of the flavor substances of koji wine and the improvement of the physicochemical structure of the cellar mud, and finally forms a microbial community with rich biological activity that is beneficial to winemaking.

But old cellar pools are extremely scarce.

Statistics from the China Liquor Industry Association show that in the entire liquor industry, there are less than 1/10,000 of the cellars that are more than 100,000 years old.

The secret of Wuliangye wine is derived from the most precious living heritage - the ancient cellar pools of the Yuan and Ming dynasties.

Wuliangye Yuanming Ancient Cellar Pond Group is also known as Wuliangye 501 Workshop, which is composed of Changfasheng, Lichuan Yong, Tingyuelou, Tianxifu, Liu Dingxing, Zhong Sanhe, Zhang Wanhe, Quan Hengchang and other eight ancient liquor workshops and hundreds of ancient cellar pools, which is the largest, most complete, and longest continuous and uninterrupted fermentation found in China so far. The Tentative List of China's World Cultural Heritage is known as "living history".

Don't look at it 'a bad rain and a knife on a sunny day', but it's the treasure of our town! Walking into the world's only "cellar mud" as the theme of the 503 workshop cultural exhibition hall, a craggy gray-white mud block was placed in the most eye-catching position, which attracted the attention of the guests.

Every gram of this mud contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms, which is worth far more than its weight**. According to the docent of the exhibition hall, in 2005, the Wuliangye ancient cellar mud was permanently collected by the National Museum of China, becoming the only "living cultural relic" in the collection of cultural relics. In more than 700 years of uninterrupted brewing, the repeated cycle of "raising grains with cellars and cultivating cellars with grains" has promoted the continuous optimization of microbial populations, and finally formed a unique micro-ecosystem that is beneficial to winemaking, giving Wuliangye wine a mellow and luscious aroma of the ancient cellar.

Jingle bell" As the overhead loading crane work bell rang, the No. 39-3 retort of workshop 523 was lifted and put on the stall drying equipment next door, which was the third retort completed by the team today. The 523 workshop is 1,600 meters long and more than 200 meters wide, covering an area of about 350,000 square meters, and was completed and put into operation in 2003. There are a total of 13,112 cellars in the workshop, and the winemaking microorganisms cultivated from the ancient cellars of the Yuan and Ming dynasties have long been active in them. At the peak of the day, the diligent microorganisms in the sake lees, the busy workers in the cellars, the mist steaming in the air, and the ...... of the traffic overheadTogether, they present a fiery scene of a large industry.

From even 529 all the way, the wind picking group traveled along the tunnel of time, and witnessed the iteration of Chinese liquor for hundreds of years in half a day. "Inclusive, complementary and magnificent! Zhao Binghui, a guest of the wind picking group, expressed his feelings with three idioms. In the eyes of more guests, an enterprise can not only truly continue the long-standing ingenuity, but also serve the needs of the times with the large-scale production of modern industry, and realize these scenarios in actual production, which is the heritage and accumulation of the leading liquor industry.

If the last 700 years of glory came from the gift of microorganisms in the ancient cellar mud, then the germination of the next 700 years was born in the scientific and technological innovation of winemaking microorganisms.

According to reports, in recent years, Wuliangye's scientific research has made breakthroughs one after another, and four new strains have been discovered from the ancient cellar pond and cellar mud, including Hexiabacterium lactis (JNU-WLY1368), Propionic acid proteophilus (JNU-WLY501), Clostridium cymbaligenes (WLY-B-L2), and Air Bush Yeast (WLY-L-M-1), which have accelerated the unveiling of the scientific mystery of the complexity of the brewing system of strong flavor liquor. And promote the research and application of microorganisms in liquor brewing to reach the international leading level.

Nowadays, on the basis of ensuring the safety and stability of the core brewing flora of liquor brewing, Wuliangye is speeding up the construction of the largest enterprise strain bank in China's liquor industry, and has collected more than 400 species, more than 1,000 strains and more than 20,000 copies of Wuliangye brewing microbial strains, providing comprehensive strain resources for the technological innovation and production and application of Wuliangye and even Chinese liquor, and constantly writing a new chapter for a "living" inheritance of harmony and beauty.

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