Shaoxing drinks its wine warm: the fermented small plates of a canal town

By four in the afternoon the counter at Xianheng Jiudian (咸亨酒店, Xiánhēng Jiǔdiàn) on Lu Xun Middle Road is three deep, and almost nobody is eating dinner. They are drinking huangjiu (黄酒, huángjiǔ) — warmed amber rice wine — from small bowls, with a saucer of pale beans set between the elbows. The men stand the way Kong Yiji stood in the Lu Xun story written near here a century ago: at the bar rather than a table, because the bar costs less and the wine, not the meal, is the reason you came.

What warm means here

Shaoxing wine is neither chilled nor scalded. The house sets a pewter pot in a basin of hot water and brings it to just above blood heat, so the surface steams without ever bubbling. Cold, they say, sits badly in the stomach; boiling drives the fragrance off. A bowl of the everyday dry style, yuanhong (元红, yuánhóng), runs about 10 to 20 yuan, and the shelves behind the counter are stacked with the sealed clay jars of huadiao (花雕, huādiāo), the carved-flower version aged longer and poured on better days.

The four grades sit on a sweetness ladder that locals read at a glance: yuanhong the driest, then jiafan (加饭, jiāfàn) with more rice in the mash, then the richer shanniang (善酿, shànniàng), and xiangxue (香雪, xiāngxuě) the sweetest, closer to a dessert wine. Strength runs 14 to 18 percent, higher than a beer drinker expects, which is the quiet trap in an afternoon that feels like tea. The romantic jar is Nü'er Hong (女儿红, nǚ'ér hóng), wine buried in the ground when a daughter is born and dug up for her wedding — a story you will be told before you finish the first bowl.

绍兴人喝黄酒，讲究温到微烫——冷喝伤胃，滚烫又散了香。

The beans, and the three stinks

The classic thing to eat while you drink is fennel beans, huíxiāng dòu (茴香豆): dried broad beans simmered with star anise and fennel until chewy, sold by the small dish for a handful of yuan. They are deliberately unexciting, made to be worried at slowly, one at a time, over an hour of talk. This is the beans Kong Yiji counted so jealously in the story, and the shopkeepers know it, which is why the dish never leaves the menu.

Then there are the sān chòu (三臭), the town's three stinks, which no one prints in English and few waiters will warn you about. Chou doufu (臭豆腐, chòu dòufu), fermented tofu fried dark and crisp, is the mild one. Harder is méi xiàn cài gěng (霉苋菜梗), amaranth stalks cured in an old brine until the fibrous tube softens and you suck the custardy inside straight out of the skin. The third, chou donggua (臭冬瓜, chòu dōngguā), is winter melon steamed in the same funk. The brine, méi lǔ (霉卤), is a house heirloom, topped up and never thrown out, and it is the reason two shops on the same lane taste nothing alike.

The bar is where you learn the town: what it ferments, what it hoards, what it refuses to explain.

When the wine becomes the sauce

Huangjiu does not stay in the bowl. Shaoxing cooks it into half the table, and the two methods to know are zao (糟) and zui (醉). Zao means cured in the pressed wine lees or their brine, zāolǔ (糟卤); zui means drowned raw or barely cooked in the wine itself. A plate of zui ji (醉鸡, zuì jī) — cold drunken chicken, the meat gelled and sweet with wine — sits in most cold-dish cases and runs around 25 to 40 yuan.

The dish that anchors a proper table is meigancai kourou (梅干菜扣肉, méigāncài kòuròu): pork belly steamed for hours over dried, fermented mustard greens until the fat gives way and the greens turn near-black and salty-sweet, roughly 40 to 60 yuan for a bowl built to be shared. The same dried greens turn up flattened into a sesame flatbook, meigancai shaobing (梅干菜烧饼), sold hot for a few yuan from bakery windows along the old streets — the cheapest way to taste what the town does with a vegetable it decided to preserve instead of eat fresh.

Where the old town drinks

The best afternoons are not at the famous tavern but on Cangqiao Historic Street (仓桥直街, Cāngqiáo Zhíjiē), a canal-side lane of low grey houses where families still live upstairs and pour wine downstairs. Shops sell huangjiu loose, ladled from vats and priced by the jin (斤, about 500 grams), and you can carry a bottle to a plastic stool and drink it beside the water. Black-awning boats, wupeng chuan (乌篷船, wūpéng chuán), rowed with the boatman's foot on the oar, still work this stretch and the canals around Lu Xun Native Place (鲁迅故里, Lǔ Xùn Gùlǐ) a few minutes east.

Cangqiao is walkable and free to enter, unlike the ticketed heritage cluster nearby, and its shophouses keep long hours, roughly nine in the morning until the drinkers thin out around nine at night. Order the way the counter does: one pot of yuanhong, one dish of beans, one of the stinks if you are brave, and let the table fill slowly rather than all at once.

Getting there, and getting it right

Shaoxing sits twenty minutes by high-speed rail from Hangzhou. Trains from Hangzhou East (杭州东) reach Shaoxing North (绍兴北, Shàoxīng Běi) in about 18 to 25 minutes for roughly 20 to 30 yuan, and Metro Line 1 runs from that station into the city; the downtown Shaoxing Station is closer to the old lanes if your train stops there. From either, the Lu Xun and Cangqiao district is a short taxi or bus ride, and once inside it you walk. Come in the cooler months if you can — huangjiu is a winter drink, and the traditional brewing season, dōngniàng (冬酿), begins around the start of winter, when the new wine is at its best.

Budget an unhurried afternoon at 60 to 100 yuan a person for wine and several small plates, less if you drink loose wine on the street. The one mistake to avoid is treating this like the salted cooking wine sold abroad under the same name: do not ask for it iced, do not expect it sweet unless you ordered the xiangxue, and do not match the pace of the retired men beside you. They have decades of practice, and the wine is stronger than the bowl lets on.