Baijiu is the Chinese grain spirit that most visitors meet by accident and then avoid, usually because the first glass they were handed was cheap, warm and rough. Sichuan makes the best-known of it, and tasting it deliberately - at the right strength, at the right temperature, with food - produces a completely different impression. The province's distilleries are among the most famous in the country, and Chengdu is close enough to several of the production towns to be a practical base for tasting.
How baijiu is made and drunk
Baijiu is distilled from sorghum, sometimes with wheat, rice, maize or barley, and fermented with a solid starter culture called qu rather than with a liquid yeast. The style varies enormously by region and by the age of the fermentation pits: some are clean and grainy, some are heavy with the aroma of fermented fruit, some are smoky or soy-like. Strength is typically between forty and fifty-two per cent, and the spirit is drunk in small thimble-sized glasses, always with food, and often with toasts. It is not sipped like whisky, and it is not meant to be drunk quickly either; the local habit is small glasses, frequently refilled, over a long meal.
What else Sichuan drinks
Alongside baijiu, the province makes fermented glutinous rice wine, sweet and low in alcohol, often served warm with a few grains of rice in the bowl and drunk as a dessert or a snack rather than with a meal. There is also a strong tradition of fruit wines and of rice wines from the minority regions in the west of the province. In Chengdu, teahouses and the older restaurants serve these alongside tea, and a bottle of the local plum or glutinous rice wine is cheap and easy to find in any supermarket.
Practical notes
Spirits sold in supermarkets are reliable and well labelled; the very cheap bottles in plain glass are the ones to avoid. A sensible tasting is three or four expressions of different ages from the same producer, in small pours, with food and water alongside. Chinese hosts will toast repeatedly, and the standard way to manage it without giving offence is to keep the glass topped up and drink slowly, or to explain that you are driving. If you want to buy a bottle to take home, check your airline's allowance for alcohol in checked baggage before you do.
