Ly Seo Ho pours maize wine from a 20-litre can into glazed terracotta jars in the corner of his house in Ban Pho commune in the north-western Bac Ha District in Lao Cai Province.

It’s crop season. As with every other farmer in this village about 300km north of Ha Noi, Ho is busy with farming and house chores. He plants corn every morning and makes wine until late in the evening.

The village counts on Ho for keeping on reserve dozens of small and big jars of maize wine. A speciality of Ban Pho Commune, the wine has made the ethnic minority market of Bac Ha District known nationwide.

The popularity of the wine has made Ho, 66, a local celebrity as the village expert. He’s been making the wine since he was 12.

With the wine an integral part of the Mong people’s daily lives, the old man finds himself making a new batch of wine every week.

For Mong people in the north-western provinces, maize is their second staple food after rice because maize grows well in the mountains, while rice requires lots of water and its growth is more susceptible to changing conditions.

While other people such as Dao, Tay or Nung people all make maize wine, the wine produced by the Mong people in Ban Pho Commune is known as the best, thanks to the special quality of the water and cool weather the people experience year round at more than 1,000m above sea level.

Maize wine has made Ho’s house a popular destination for foreign visitors – where he hosts them with the warm welcome of the Mong people’s hospitality, telling old stories, playing the khen (bamboo flute) and serving up plenty of maize wine.

"I make sure that wine in Ban Pho is the best you can find," Ho boasts.

He noted that the wine needs to be kept cool in jars in corners for years to bring out the particularly sweet taste of maize.

Traditional recipe

The trick to making wine has been passed down to this Mong man through five generations, and he still uses the traditional recipe so that the wine tastes the same as it did for the ancestors.

Ho explained that the fermenting process with hong mi seeds helps soften the flavour of the alcohol, resulting in a strong but smooth tasting wine.

The hong mi plant is often grown with rice in paddy fields and produces a low-yield harvest once a year. It looks like wild grass and is harvested after six months.

"Only five or six households in the village still use traditional methods [of making wine]. We have our own gourmet customers who can tell the difference between maize wines."

Kitchen work

The old man makes wine every weekend to keep up with customers visiting the Bac Ha market on Sundays, looking to buy extra wine for parties, weddings or restaurants.

The process for making the wine is the same as for other traditional wines.

"It’s like cooking sticky rice," Ho says.

"Don’t let the fire burn the maize," Ho warns. "You’ll get such smooth wine that will make you feel like you’ll never forget."

Ho usually makes two sinh (sinh in Mong language means 30kg) of maize a sitting. It takes him around six hours to turn 120kg of maize into 35 litres of wine. While the wine doesn’t bring in much profit, he can at least use the wine’s by-product to feed the pigs.

"Although the wine is 50 per cent alcohol, it doesn’t burn your tongue and throat. You just feel the heat running down your throat and the sweet taste of corn," says Nguyen Van Diep, a Dao ethnic minority resident in Bac Ha town.

"Although life has changed so much over a decade, Bac Ha has sustained traditional cultural festivals."

Plum wine

Bac Ha District is also well known as the land of Tam Hoa plums harvested every April.

However, the area doesn’t have a processing plant to help diversify the plum’s products into plum juice, wine, rum or jam. Having this range of products would allow farmers to take advantage of bumper crops they may otherwise be forced to dump.

Lao Cai Province made a pilot project of processing plum wine last year, but it’s just a temporary solution.

"We need to arrange the plum plantation area in the district to meet the demands of a processing plant. From my experience, the district should build small-sized processing sites rather than a large plant requiring investment," Bac Ha’s District’s vice chairman offers.

"I hope it could be a solution to change the lives of the more than 50,000 people including Mong, Tay, Nung, Phu La and Kinh, of which 46 per cent of are Mong.

To view the whole article please go to www.vietnamnews.vnanet.vn

April 16, 2008

0 Comment(s)

Post your comment here

Name (Required)

E-Mail (Required, will not be shown)

Website

* Your comment will be displayed after admin approval.

Please write the answer into the right box: 32 + 5 =