The Sweet Brew of Time: A Chinese Family’s Five-Generation Journey to Preserve the Taste of Spring Festival

As the Spring Festival approaches, a distinct sweetness begins to drift through the air in Changzhou, a canal city in eastern China. It signals the approaching holiday. The source is “tianbaijiu”— “sweet white wine” — a traditional, gently fermented brew made from glutinous rice. For many local families, making this wine is as essential to preparing for the New Year as sweeping the house or hanging red couplets.

Among the many who still practice this craft, one name stands out. By the shores of Songjian Lake, in the Yaoguan township of Jiangsu Changzhou Economic Zone, the Jade Snail Spring winery draws long lines every New Year’s season. Customers leave not just with boxes of the mellow brew, but with a taste of the festival itself — tangible, lingering, theirs to share.

This bowl of translucent, sweet rice wine is a flavor inseparable from Spring Festival in Jiangnan, the region south of the Yangtze River. Its history reaches back to the Qing Dynasty. Hong Liangji, a scholar and poet born in Changzhou, once wrote longingly of home while serving in Beijing. In one verse, he described “white wine, newly brewed, its scent drifting through the curtain.” That wine was this one.

For nearly two centuries, the craft of making it has quietly passed from hand to hand, kitchen to kitchen, generation to generation. And in one family — the Zhangs — it has been tended with exceptional care, handed down through five generations.

Zhang Weiming is the third. He is also the officially recognized bearer of “Changzhou Glutinous Rice Wine Brewing Technique,” a craft now inscribed on the city’s intangible cultural heritage list, and the head of the Jade Snail Spring winery.

His childhood memories are woven around his grandmother and mother working by the winter stove. Soaking the glutinous rice. Steaming it in bamboo baskets. Mixing in a secret, plant-based fermentation starter passed down within the family. Packing the mixture into clay pots. Wrapping them in old quilts to retain warmth. Waiting. Eight steps in total, guided not by a written recipe but by touch and instinct — the kind of knowing that only comes from watching and doing, generation after generation.

“Back then, we could only make it in winter,” Zhang recalls. “Once the weather warmed up, it would turn sour. There was no way to keep it.”

The wine was never intended for sale. It was made for family, friends, and guests who stopped by. But over time, its clean taste and the warmth it carried earned a quiet reputation.

Then came the visitors from abroad.

“An American client came to Changzhou on business,” Zhang says. “I offered him some of my mother’s wine. He loved it — and was disappointed he couldn’t take any back home. An Australian friend living in Shanghai tried it, and since then, he has looked forward to receiving it as a New Year’s gift every year.”

That recognition from across the oceans, together with the fear that his aging parents might one day take their craft with them, pushed Zhang to act. He had spent years in the biochemical industry. Now, he made a decision: to turn the family’s handmade tradition into something more — something that could be shared year-round, without additives, without compromise.

The central challenge was stability.

“The principle is simple — respect how nature ferments,” Zhang says. “But to make it work consistently, you need modern tools to create the ideal, stable environment.”

His daughter, Zhang Qiuhua, the fourth-generation successor, has witnessed the transformation firsthand.

“My grandmother’s generation followed the old ways completely,” she says. “My father brought innovation. He focused on food safety and precision.” After taking over daily operations, Qiuhua further improved the packaging and introduced in-pot fermentation to better preserve the wine’s delicate aroma.

Their combined efforts earned the winery provincial recognition as a “Jiangsu Famous, Specialty, and Excellent Small Workshop.” Today, their products are stocked in more than 200 supermarkets across Changzhou and shipped to customers nationwide.

Zhang Weiming’s parents — both in their nineties — still visit the workshop regularly. They no longer run things day to day. But they watch. They guide. They make sure the essential traditional steps are not lost.

The fifth generation has also arrived. Zhang’s grandson, now part of the family business, is experimenting with new ways to bring the old taste to younger palates — rice wine ice cream among them. The family has also started live-streaming, hoping to let the fragrance travel farther than any jar ever could.

In the final days before the Spring Festival, the Jade Snail Spring winery is busier than any other time of the year. Jar after jar of sweet rice wine is packed, sealed, and shipped — across the province, across the country, and overseas, often carried abroad by members of the Chinese diaspora returning to their ancestral homes.

For the Zhang family, the deepest wish is this: that this century-old sweetness, born from the waters and soil of Jiangnan, might travel like a New Year’s blessing to more corners of the world.

That wish is not theirs alone.

Jiangsu Changzhou Economic Zone, where the winery is located, has in recent years turned its attention to preserving local food traditions. Sweet rice wine is far from the only one. There is Hengshanqiao tofu skin, Songjian Lake fish head, Furong spiral-shell snails, and the steamed buns from Qishuyan’s Six Corners Pavilion — each carrying the imprint of generations, each a taste of home. The local government is now working to document these crafts not as relics to be stored away, but as living practices. The hope is that these flavors do not remain only in the memories of the elderly. Instead, they are finding their way back to daily life — and from there, into the future.