About This Issue
Alcohol, a substance entirely unnecessary for human survival, has emerged almost simultaneously with human civilization. Long before developing the techniques of brewing, our ancestors already savored the divine taste of naturally fermented fruits—using the word “divine” is no exaggeration. In the primordial beliefs of many cultures, alcohol was offered to the gods and, through shared drinking between humans and deities, intoxication became a means for the mind to reach the supernatural. Even in modern times, alcohol still occupies a role in religious rituals.
Our forebears intuitively grasped the mysteries of fermentation, so independently yet similarly across Taiwan, Japan, and other regions, people discovered the most primitive form of alcohol. Beyond its local emergence, alcohol became a medium linking civilizations and connecting people. The foundation of sake—rice and the koji fermentation method—is widely believed to have been introduced to Japan by migrants. Distilled spirits, appearing in Mesopotamia in ancient times, also spread eastward; thus, various Chinese huangjiu and baijiu arrived in Taiwan with Min and Yue migrants. Local crops such as sugarcane and sweet potatoes were combined with distillation techniques to produce Taiwan’s indigenous spirits. Further north, distillation traveled through the Ryukyu Islands and Kyushu to create awamori and shōchū in Japan.
In the 19th century, beer, wine, and whiskey arrived in Japan alongside the waves of modernization, joining native sake and eventually moving south with imperial expansion to appear on Taiwanese banquet tables. From 1922 onward, for eighty years, Taiwan’s alcohol market and drinking culture were dominated by a monopoly system across two foreign regimes. Starting in 1987, Western liquors were gradually allowed to be imported, and by 2002, following Taiwan’s entry into the WTO, the monopoly system finally ended. Today, what we buy and drink is largely limited only by our livers and wallets. Some pursue alcohol not merely for gustatory pleasure but to seek knowledge or master the craft of brewing, even traveling abroad for study.
Alcohol’s role in awakening human sensibility has long been witnessed in literature; even in visual art, where alcohol is not the central subject, it quietly appears in the corners of canvases, silently testifying to its companionship with human society for thousands of years. If history is a great river, perhaps what flows within it is wine itself.
The following words may serve as the best summary for this preface and for this issue of Xunfeng:
"Human civilization began alongside alcohol, and perhaps its end will also arrive accompanied by it. Alcohol is the source of intellect and emotion, arguably the only thing that distinguishes humans from beasts." —Yang Wily (ヤン・ウェンリー)
ISBN 9772518947009 01
