Phaedrine wrote:
> I've spent several hours Googling to no avail. Does anyone know if all
> Shaoxing wines have wheat in them or is it possible to get one without
> wheat or barley? I can no longer have wheat and I just can't imagine
> certain recipes w/o Shaoxing wine. Some say sherry is a good substitute
> but I've never thought so. Thanks.
>

I've been trying to find good information about *chiew* for a long time
and am still searching. If I read Chinese, I'd probably be in better
shape. At any rate, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's book, The Chinese Kitchen, has
the best information I've found yet, at least in terms of Shaoxing
wines and some other variants. She has a sketchy description of the
process of making Shaoxing wines and uses the somewhat baffling term
"wheat yeast"; otherwise, the fermentables are from rice alone. What
she means by "wheat yeast" is not clear, since wheat is a grain and
yeast is, well, it's yeast. She also writes about kao liang chiew "a
sorghum-based spirit, made with a yeast of barley and green peas", so
it's pretty clear that she uses the word "yeast" in a very creative
fashion.

Rice does not naturally contain the necessary enzymes to break starches
down into fermentable sugars in the way that barley does. The Japanese
use a specific mold to provide the necessary enzymes, and I presume the
Chinese use a similar method, even though sake and rice chiew are not
at all similar. Perhaps Lo is using "yeast" to refer to some similar
mixture of moldy grain and actual yeast, and perhaps the Shaoxing
brewers use a wheat mold that is different from the koji used to make
sake.

The point of all this being: it's doubtful that there is enough wheat
involved to be an issue (unlike most soy sauces). I have a half dozen
wines in the cupboard right now, and none even mention anything but
rice.

Just be glad that it's become much simpler to find real Shaoxing rice
wine for cooking, instead of the vile "cooking wine" that has plagued
us here for years. Cities with real Chinese communities (unlike
Portland) may have had a decent selection for much longer but it's only
recently been available (and still nowhere near the astonishing variety
I saw in Oakland earlier this month).