The wine that drips through banana leaves

The first sound is wood on wood. In a village in Hainan, China's tropical island province, someone is pounding leaves in a mortar carved from a single tree trunk: ginger leaves, sugarcane leaves, whatever the village has always used. The green pulp will become a starter, the starter will meet rice, and in a week a slow drip of wine will fall from a bundle of banana leaves into a jar below.

A starter made of leaves

The Li people of Hainan, and some Miao on the island, make 山栏酒 (shānlán jiǔ), also written 山兰酒. In the Li language it is simply *biang*: alcohol. It is brewed in places such as Baisha, Qiongzhong, Wuzhishan, Sanya and Ledong, from 山栏 rice, an upland variety grown in dry fields rather than paddies.

The heart of the wine is the starter. According to a 2025 report in 海南周刊, the leaves change from village to village: wild ginger or common ginger, sugarcane, wild orange, jackfruit and several other local plants. They are pounded in the log mortar, the 独木臼 (dúmùjiù), and the juice and pulp are kneaded with rice flour. The dough is shaped into discs or spindles, dusted with powdered old starter, and tucked into rice straw between bamboo baskets. After about four days a white bloom of mould appears. Then the cakes are dried for five to ten days.

For a European, the closest image is a sourdough mother, except that this one begins in the forest. Every village starter carries a slightly different set of leaves, which is a kind of terroir you can hold in your hand.

Wine that drips

The fermentation is just as physical. Steamed rice is mixed with the starter, wrapped in fresh banana leaves and set in a bamboo basket. After about seven days, wine begins to drip into a jar placed underneath.

First it runs milky white; later, a tourism account says, it turns "clear like jade".

It is described as low in alcohol, though no source we have read gives a figure. Its nickname, "the Moutai of the Li", says more about local pride than about taste: a modest jar wine borrowing the name of China's most famous spirit.

The craft also has a literary witness. Su Shi, the great Northern Song poet, was exiled to Hainan, and wrote the line 小酒生黎法，干糟瓦盎中: roughly, a little wine made the Li way, its dry lees in an earthenware pot. Few rural wines anywhere can point to a major poet taking notes on their method.

Two straws, one jar

Traditionally there are no cups. The wine is kept in clay jars, and two small bamboo tubes are set into one jar. Guests sit on either side and take turns. It is a drink for facing someone, not for drinking alone.

It also belongs to particular moments. Women drink it after childbirth. In Ledong Li Autonomous County, people drink it together at the 三月三 (sānyuèsān) festival, on the third day of the third lunar month, as Xinhua reported in 2023.

The tradition is alive, and it has found a small market. In Baisha, an artisan named 朱晓保 (Zhū Xiǎobǎo) brews once a year under the brand 黎家传奇, cellars the wine for a year and sells mostly in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. A commercial winery in Qiongzhong produces it on a larger scale, and reports no exports. Named villagers in Wuzhishan and Qiongzhong were still making the leaf starter by hand in 2025. In 2023, according to a Hainan news headline, Baisha's 山栏 rice-farming system was recognised as one of China's important agricultural heritage systems. We found no confirmed heritage listing for the wine-making itself.

Shanlan wine is one branch of the large and very old world of Chinese rice wine, where the starter matters as much as the grain. From Hainan's leaf cakes to the herbal starters of Guizhou, these wines show that, in China, the microbes often carry the story of a place more faithfully than the rice does.