Unique Huang Hua Wine

Tilt the bottle and pour in the Huang Hua wine.

Holding out your head in a porcelain cup signifies true friendship.

Playing the moon lute at midnight

Under the gentle autumn moonlight, the heart lets its soul wander.

To make a delicious cup of Huang Hua wine, from the initial brewing to the final serving, it takes about a year or more. The longer it's aged, the more wonderfully fragrant and refreshing its flavor becomes. To have a jar of Huang Hua wine at home, you have to make it yourself; only then will it be truly high-quality.

The "Hoang Hoa" flower is actually a type of golden chrysanthemum. This variety of chrysanthemum has a short stem, small petals, and abundant blooms. When in bloom, the flowers are the size of a fingertip, with plump, round petals. Each year, people diligently cultivate a few dozen pots, firstly for enjoyment, and secondly to use as ingredients for making Hoang Hoa wine. Chrysanthemums are prone to pests, but pesticides are never used to ensure cleanliness. Growers must diligently use lights to chase away butterflies and remove pests daily. The pots must be placed in a location with plenty of sunlight, minimal wind, and protection from rain. When the chrysanthemums bloom, the pots should be rotated every three days, adjusting their position by about 30 degrees so that both the leaves and flowers receive sufficient sunlight and dew until full bloom.

Huang Hua Wine. Photo: Internet

When the chrysanthemums bloom, just leave them outside to admire while drinking tea. Harvest them when you see a few blossoms starting to wilt. When picking, handle them gently to avoid crushing the petals, and use only your thumb to pinch the stem just below the calyx. Once harvested, spread the flowers out on banana leaves and air dry them. Wait until the flowers are slightly wilted and the moisture content is around 30%. Then, divide the dried flowers into two parts. One part is mixed with the sticky rice when steaming, and the other is used to ferment with rice wine.

To make good rice wine, the main ingredient must be sticky rice. Sticky rice is round, with short, plump grains that are milky white. When cooked, the grains are both chewy and fragrant, with the scent of rice flowers in bloom, the aroma of freshly harvested straw, and the scent of betel nuts soaked in night dew. These three scents blend together to create a unique, fragrant aroma – a rustic, earthy scent that is both noble and refreshing. This is an old, long-growing variety of sticky rice; it takes nine months from sowing to harvesting. Rice fields are used exclusively for sticky rice, without intercropping with regular rice, otherwise the grains will become mixed or crossbred, reducing the value and quality of the rice. Using freshly harvested sticky rice grains guarantees a superb batch of wine.

When making rice wine, glutinous rice is washed once, then mixed with dried chrysanthemum flowers and steamed into sticky rice. Too little chrysanthemum will not be fragrant enough, too much will make it bitter; the cook calculates the right amount, usually based on experience. In terms of proportions, about 10 kilograms of glutinous rice mixed with 300 grams of dried chrysanthemum flowers is ideal. The cooked sticky rice is spread evenly, about five centimeters thick, on a tray or basket lined with banana leaves. After the sticky rice cools, yeast is sifted evenly over it.

The yeast used to make rice wine must be traditional yeast made from leaves and roots found in the forest. If you can obtain yeast made from the seeds of the red millet from the Northwest region, the resulting wine will be especially fragrant and delicious. After mixing the yeast into the tray of cooked glutinous rice, the distiller needs to do a few more important things that not everyone in the distillation profession knows. These include covering the tray with several fresh banana leaves and leaving it for two nights before placing it in a large earthenware pot for another three nights of fermentation. The purpose is to allow the bacteria to consume all the yeast in the rice. After three days of dry fermentation, the next step is wet fermentation by adding several buckets of water to the pot and waiting another four nights for the fermentation to reach the desired level before distillation.

To make good wine, every drop must be carefully prepared. The bamboo tube that carries the distilled liquor into the bottle, while still green, enhances the wine's aroma. The wine that just flows into the bottle is Hoàng Hoa wine. But that alone isn't enough. To have a truly authentic cup of Hoàng Hoa wine, the winemaker must add a few dried golden chrysanthemum petals along with goji berries, rehmannia root, codonopsis root, and Korean ginseng, then pour it into a container, bury it underground, and let it ferment for at least a year before using it. If the burial site is placed directly where the rainwater drips and receives plenty of sunlight on sunny days, each drop of wine poured into a cup will be no less exquisite than any fine wine in the world .

When surrounded by kindred spirits, by the window under the eaves, gazing up at the moon, raising a cup of Hoang Hoa wine, eyes taking in the honey-colored liquid, nose inhaling the aroma to absorb the essence distilled from the scents of autumn and the flavors of the earth, ears listening to the mournful sounds of the zither and lute like laments of the nation's fate, lips sipping the carefully brewed distilled water that carries the scent of tears from the homeland, then squinting and contemplating the fate of life in the ocean of humanity, wondering why the heart cannot feel light and soaring amidst this earthly realm…

Source: https://baodaklak.vn/du-lich/202504/doc-dao-ruou-hoang-hoa-a2b1648/