Wine Culture 美酒文化 Making Wine 酿酒

古代中国人在酿酒技术上的一项重要发明，就是用酒曲造酒。原始的酒曲是发霉或发芽的谷物，主要是小麦和稻米，人们对发霉的谷物加以改良，就制成了适于酿酒的酒曲。酒曲里含有使淀粉糖化的丝状菌（霉菌）及促成酒化的酵母菌，可将谷物原料糖化发酵成酒。南北各地利用不同谷类制曲，酒的种类也随之增加。南北朝（420—589）时，制酒曲的技术已达到很高水平，当时的重要著作《齐民要术》就记述了12种制酒曲的方法。
Making wine with the distiller’s yeast is an important invention of the brewing technology for ancient Chinese. The original distiller’s yeast is made of the musty or germinant grain, mainly including wheat and rice. With the improvement of the musty grain, people made the distiller’s yeast suitable for brewing. The distiller’s yeast contains filamentous fungus (mildew) which can make the starch diastatic and yeast which can help to make wine to make the raw sugar diastatic to ferment into wine. Due to different grain for distiller’s yeast in the South and North, the varieties of the wine increased accordingly. By the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589), the technology of making distiller’s yeast had reached a high level with 12 methods of making distiller’s yeast recorded in the important work of Qi Min Yao Shu at that time.
这是一种自然发酵的方法，历经数千年，发酵技术已相当成熟，而制曲酿酒技术的基本原理和方法至今仍在使用。利用这种方法酿酒，主要是凭借经验，生产规模一般不大，基本是手工操作，酒的质量并没有严格的科学检测标准。
This is a natural fermentation method with thousands of years’ history. With mature brewing technology, the basic principle and method of such technology are still in use now. For that using this method to make wine is mainly relying on the experience with small production scale and manual operation and lacks scientific testing standard for the wine quality.