"Rice wine is special, rice wine is delicious. It's something you just can't do without." Maybe--but with a sixfold price hike in the offing, Taiwan's cooks are starting to stew.
Childbirth is hardly the easiest experience for a woman, but it does have its compensations. In Taiwan, the benefits include a variety of gastronomic treats designed to build up the strength of the new mother and protect her health, with particular attention paid to the first month after the birth. Many new mothers check into special tso yueh-tzu ("sitting-the-month") clinics, and even those who do not will be indulged with a plethora of supposedly therapeutic foods prepared by female relatives.
Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine swear by one dish above all others at this time: sesame oil chicken, a dish cooked in sesame oil, ginger, and generous amounts of locally brewed rice wine. Indeed, rice wine is so highly regarded that it will find its way into much of the new mother's intake during this key period in her life, when even the consumption of plain drinking water is discouraged on account of its excessively "cooling" properties.
But recently delivered mothers are not the only beneficiaries of Taiwan's fondness for rice wine. The liquor is used in a huge variety of dishes. Professional and home cooks alike are devoted to the vodka-clear liquid, which in its time has provoked outrageous hoarding, futile attempts by the government to find substitutes, price hikes, and even fistfights in supermarkets when quantities fall short.
The variety manufactured by the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Board (TTWB), popularly referred to as "Red Label Rice Wine" even though the label is more of a dark and sickly pink, is the one usually purchased for cooking and seasoning purposes. Anything else is regarded as just a cheap substitute. It packs quite a punch, but the "wine" is not something that the average person would want to drink--although army conscripts stuck for anything better have been known to consume it in quantity, often cut with orange juice.
As a kitchen ingredient, however, rice wine is something else. It complements entrees such as ginger duck, four-spirit soup (a soup made of pig intestines laced with medicinal herbs), and sanpei ("three-cup") chicken, flavored with equal portions of rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. "Rice wine isn't a quenching drink, but it really has no equal in cooking," enthuses hotel manager, food critic, columnist, and radio host Grace Liu. "It smells appetizing and goes perfectly with all kinds of foods."
Other types of alcohol such as Shaohsing, which is made from polished glutinous rice, are used in the preparation of local food, but nothing can match the popularity of rice wine, especially when it comes to seafood. The liquor was first produced in 1950 by the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau, as the organization was then known. The island had long been growing high-quality rice, and the wine was considered a smart way to utilize surplus stocks. The product was popular from the start, and sales now amount to some 240 million bottles a year, accounting for a major share of the board's total alcohol production. It was originally sold only in 0.6-liter glass bottles for NT$20 (65 cents) plus a refundable deposit of NT$4 (13 cents), but these containers are currently being phased out in favor of a recyclable, non-returnable plastic bottle that retails for NT$21.
Rice wine may be a godsend to cooks, but it has generated its share of controversy over the years. When the government decided it wanted to dismantle its monopoly of the alcoholic beverage market in preparation for entering the World Trade Organization (WTO), it promulgated a new Wine and Tobacco Tax Law that both did away with the state subsidies that had benefited rice wine and imposed hefty taxes on local alcohol and tobacco products. Under the new law, promulgated by the president in April this year, the price of a 0.6-liter plastic bottle of rice wine will rise in stages to NT$135 (US$4.35) by 2003.
Not everyone is happy with that. Some critics have called the government's moves to tax rice wine a sellout to the ogres of globalization. In a piece entitled "The WTO and the Rice Wine Event," which recently appeared on the website of the New Generation Youth Group, an outlet for graduate students and other young intellectuals, political activist Huo Ching wrote: "They say an open market and free competition under the WTO will be beneficial, but this will make rice wine, something we use every day, prohibitively expensive. This humiliating stance taken by the ROC government has compromised our rights."
As early as May of last year, when word of the new legislation began to leak out, speculators swarmed to hoard bottles of rice wine in anticipation of the coming price hike. The result was a shortage not only of rice wine but also of bottles, several million of which have disappeared from circulation along with any hope of claiming back the NT$4 deposit. As a result, the TTWB ruled that no one might buy more than two bottles per shopping trip (although women who can prove they are pregnant may buy up to twenty at a time). Commercial users of the product are allowed to order as many bottles as they want from the board.
In a further attempt to alleviate the problem, the board introduced two new rice wines, one of them manufactured in Singapore and one domestically. The latter, "Taohsiang Cooking Spirits," contains salt, and local cooks complain that this deprives them of control over the cooking process. Both products have turned out to be marketing flops.
The popular "Red Label" rice wine is unlikely to disappear from kitchen shelves, although it may figure somewhat less prominently in Taiwan's culinary repertoire. "I'll go on using it, but not as often," Grace Liu says. "Rice wine is special, rice wine is delicious. It's something you just can't do without."