Ninety percent of millet wine is “fake”, an FTV report claimed last year (see Chinese-language article here), in that it is not pure millet fermentation. Mostly it is made using sticky rice (糯米; nuo-mi) rather than millet (小米, xiao-mi; “small rice”).
Apparently labeling rice wine as millet wine does not contravene regulations, so long the ingredients (成份) are listed correctly. These tend to be in a much smaller print, of course.
The television programme said that to differentiate between alcohols made by fermenting millet and sticky rice, hold them up in the rays of the sun and look carefully, millet-made alcohol is more yellow, while that of sticky rice is whiter. Millet wine also tends to have sediment settling more clearly. The price might also be a clue, since a catty (斤; jin; 600g) of millet around is NT$15 (US$0.50) more expensive than sticky rice, making a bottle of millet alcohol about NT$50 (US$1.60) more expensive.
Both of these are purely fermented brews. More worrying are manufacturers who make a processed alcohol using water, sugar, starch, emulsifier, flavouring and ethyl alcohol, the programme claimed.
Text and photos © Jiyue Publications 2012
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