Fake Liquors Flow as Demand Soars for China’s Fabled Sorghum Spirit

[lsanderson]

Home distilleries like this one are common in Maotai, where China’s state-owned distillery produces the genuine sorghum liquor called Moutai.
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: February 13, 2011

MAOTAI, China — If history is indeed written by the victors, then this isolated mountain hamlet in southern Guizhou Province hit the jackpot when Red Army soldiers sought refuge here in the spring of 1935. Exhausted by their long-distance retreat from Nationalist forces, Mao’s guerrillas used the town’s bracing 144-proof liquor to disinfect wounds, tame diarrhea and take the edge off their jangled nerves.

“The Long March was a success in large part due to Maotai,” the rebel commander Zhou Enlai later told historians. In 1949, after becoming prime minister of the newly established People’s Republic, Mr. Zhou designated the sorghum-based liquor, called Moutai, China’s “national wine,” giving it an undeniable marketing edge over the other gullet-searing grain spirits, collectively known as baijiu, tossed back at banquet tables across the nation. More