National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0063 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 63 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000248
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

 

THE GRAPE-VINE   237

yüan (in an-si) take the second rank. According to some statements, grapes, when stored for a long time, will develop into wine through a natural process. This wine is fragrant, sweet, and exceedingly strong: this is the genuine grape-wine."' The Tstao mu tse F * , written

in 1378 by Ye Tse-k'i   *, contains the following information:
"Under the Yüan dynasty grape-wine was manufactured in Ki-nin and other circuits Ni of San-si Province. In the eighth month

they went to the T`ai-han Mountain   1112 in order to test the
genuine and adulterated brands : the genuine kind when water is poured on it, will float; the adulterated sort, when thus treated, will freeze.' In wine which has long been stored, there is a certain portion which even in extreme cold will never freeze, while all the remainder is frozen: this is the spirit and fluid secretion of wine.' If this is drunk,

the essence will penetrate into a man's arm-pits   , and he will die.
Wine kept for two or three years develops great poison."

The first author who offers a coherent notice and intelligent discussion of the subject of grape-wine is Li Si-ben at the end of the sixteenth century.' He is well acquainted with the fact that this kind of wine was anciently made only in the Western Countries, and that the method of manufacturing it was but introduced under the Tang after the subjugation of Kao-c`an. He discriminates between two types of grape-

wine,— the fermented Ïr:   4, of excellent taste, made from grape-
juice with the addition of leaven in the same fashion as the ordinary native rice-wine (or, if no juice is available, dried raisins may be used), and the distilled N rg. In the latter method "ten catties of grapes are taken with an equal quantity of great leaven (distillers' grains) and subjected to a process of fermentation. The whole is then placed in an earthen kettle and steamed. The drops are received in a vessel, and this liquid is of red color, and very pleasing." There is one question, however, left open by Li Si-Zen. In a preceding notice on distillation

he states that this is not an ancient method, but was practised only from the Yüan period; he then describes it in its application to rice-

lands," or maybe "alcohol." The latter word has never penetrated into China in any form. Chinese a-la-ki does not represent the word "alcohol," as conceived by some authors, for instance, J. MACGOWAN (Journal China Branch Roy. As. Soc., Vol. VII, 1873, p. 237); see the following note.

1 This work is also the first that contains the word a-la-lei iri# *4   , from

Arabic 'araq (see T'oung Pao, 1916, p. 483).

2 A range of mountains separating San-si from ti-li and Ho-nan.

3 This is probably a fantasy. We can make nothing of it, as it is not stated how the adulterated wine was made.

4 This possibly is the earliest Chinese allusion to alcohol.

5 Pen ts'ao kan mu, Ch. 25, p. 14 b.