How the people in "Jin Ping Mei" "sieve wine"

The people of Ximen Qing’s family drink like water. Drink at home, go out to drink, and drink before you come home and go to the kang. If you go for an affair, have a drink first, and after the cloudy rain, you have to set up a stall and have two drinks before you can lift your pants and leave. I don't know whether it was because the wine was too good to drink or people were addicted to it. Even a person like me who can't live without alcohol can't help but be stunned when they see these scenes.

However, I later learned that it is not necessarily good to drink, but to be able to drink so much is mainly due to the low base of the wine.

It is said that "Compendium of Materia Medica" once recorded:

Soju is not an ancient method. Since the Yuan Dynasty, the method was created, using strong wine and glutinous grains into the retort, steaming the gas, and using the utensils to absorb the dew. Any sour wine can be steamed.

The shochu mentioned here is the current liquor. Before the Yuan Dynasty, there was no such strong wine, and what everyone drank was nothing more than rice wine with a low degree of alcohol. The ancient rice wine is not what you see on the supermarket shelves now, although it may be a little thick, but the texture is uniform. At that time, the rice wine may look closer to the mashed grain. The water and rice are mixed together, and it needs to be "sieved" before drinking.

"Jin Ping Mei" is a strange book, and the word wine color runs through it. It is said that in a total of 100 chapters, there are 36 detailed descriptions about sex. And when it comes to wine, it's even more incredible. Only the 25th and 62nd episodes did not mention alcohol, and the other 88 episodes were drinking every time. Once you drink it, you often have to turn around.

It is not uncommon to drink alcohol, but after seeing too much about "sifting wine", it will be difficult to pass. One day, I suddenly became curious and wanted to know what the "sifting wine" was doing.

After reading a lot of articles, the most intuitive one is of course as I said at the beginning, because there is lees in the wine, it must be "sieved" before drinking to ensure a smooth entrance. This kind of explanation is very useful when there is only one "sieve" word, such as:

Ximen Qing opened another jar of double-material Magu wine and taught Chunhong to use a cloth retort to sieve it up. Zheng Chun played the zheng and sang in a low voice. Ximen Qing ordered him to sing a set of "The Wind at the Bottom of the Willow".

But sometimes, the word "hot" is added after the word "sieve" in "Jin Ping Mei", for example:

He went to bed and asked Chunmeishai to warm up the shochu. He took a piece of the medicine in the gold piercing heart box and swallowed it. He lay on his back on the pillow and asked the woman, "My son, go down and get the medicine for you. It looks like you made it."

At this time, it seems that the sieve is not only a sieve, but also includes heating, and the imaginary vessel will change. For example, simple "sieving wine" can be done with gauze. But to heat at the same time, it is much more complicated. It may have to be a metal container with gauze on it, while filtering, and there is a "red clay small stove" below it, which is heated at the same time, like an alcohol stove under the hanging ear coffee.

When I was a child, adults still had to heat up their drinks in winter. Use a glass measuring cup with a thin neck and a wide bottom, and place it in the hot water. Or place directly on the corner of the stove. It must be the corner, and it is estimated that the glass will burn in the middle.

The matter of "sieving wine" seems to be logically self-consistent by imagination in the above two situations.

However, wait a minute, and attentive readers have noticed that in the paragraph quoted above, Chunmei sieves "shochu". Hey, the shoulders fell and the faith collapsed again. Logically, shochu is distilled liquor, so it shouldn't need to be filtered, so why use a "sieve"?

After thinking about it for a long time, two possibilities came to mind. A "sieve" mentioned in "Jin Ping Mei" is not necessarily a real "sieve", and sometimes it may be used as a habit, just like in some local dialects, "pour wine" is still called "sieve wine" . Another possibility is that the "shochu" mentioned in the text may not be the same as what we understand now. Or simply the distillation method is relatively backward, such as the lid of our house, if it is not cleaned, the distilled liquid will naturally contain impurities, and it also needs to be "sieved".

Oh yeah, problem solved!

However, but!

According to Li Shizhen, shochu was a winemaking technique that was introduced from the Western Regions in the Yuan Dynasty. According to the "Golden Ping Mei", which was under the rule of Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty, there is no such thing as shochu.

There are also two possibilities, one is simple, it is pure bug. After all, in the days when Lanling Xiaoxiao was born, there was no Internet, and it was not easy to find information. He didn't know that the plot was justifiable. Another kind, the shochu in "Jin Ping Mei" is really not the kind of shochu that was introduced in the Yuan Dynasty.