One of China’s Nine Signature Huangjiu Regions

Ask a Chinese wine drinker where huangjiu — the amber-colored fermented grain wine often called “China’s national drink” — comes from, and the answer is almost always Shaoxing, in the Yangtze Delta. Far fewer know that a thousand kilometers north, in the basin city of Nanyang in Henan Province, a very different huangjiu tradition has been quietly fermenting for three millennia — made not from glutinous rice, but from a rare red millet found almost nowhere else on earth.

That obscurity began to change in October 2019. At the 14th China International Alcoholic Beverage Expo in Shanghai, the China Alcoholic Drinks Association unveiled its list of the world’s distinctive liquor-producing regions. Among the nine signature huangjiu regions named, Nanyang was the sole representative from Henan — recognized specifically for its red-millet huangjiu. For a city better known as the birthplace of Zhang Heng, the Han-dynasty astronomer, and Zhang Zhongjing, the sage of Chinese medicine, the award confirmed what locals had long maintained: Nanyang is northern China’s millet-huangjiu capital.

Today the region counts 29 enterprises holding national huangjiu production licenses and an annual output exceeding 100,000 tonnes — more than three-quarters of all huangjiu made in Henan. Production clusters in Dengzhou, Tanghe, Xinye, Zhenping, Neixiang, Xixia and Xichuan, forming a multi-center industrial map. In Liuiji Town of Dengzhou alone, some 60 wineries and 800 workshops produce over 15,000 tonnes a year and support more than 2,000 jobs.

A Grain That Exists to Be Brewed

Nanyang’s defining asset is its raw material. The honggu — literally “red wine grain,” also marketed as red millet — is an indigenous foxtail millet of the Nanyang Basin whose husk turns deep red at maturity. Unlike ordinary millet, it is rarely eaten as a staple; as local growers put it, “the grain is not for the rice bowl, only for the wine jar.” Compared with the glutinous rice and broomcorn millet used elsewhere, it carries higher levels of protein, fat, vitamins and essential amino acids.

Brewers and researchers argue this accounts for the region’s distinctive profile. Red-millet huangjiu is deeper in color than southern styles, and testing has found notably higher levels of total flavonoids and phenolic acids — a finding that Zhengzhou University researchers have spent years substantiating. The water matters too: most producers draw on the Danjiang River system, the same mineral-rich headwaters that feed the middle route of China’s South–North Water Diversion Project.

From Field to Cellar: Building the Growing-and-Brewing Base

What once depended on scattered smallholders is being reorganized into an integrated growing-and-brewing base. The model is “company + base + farmer”: enterprises lease and consolidate fragmented plots, supply seed, and buy back the entire harvest under contract, standardizing planting, pest control, harvesting, processing and packaging.

Several milestones mark this shift. In Xixia County, a leading producer partnered with the Nanyang Academy of Sciences to establish a designated red-millet seed research base, consolidating land across Wuliqiao, Huiche and Danshui townships and involving some 500 farming households. In Xinye County’s Qian’gaomiao Township, the localYellow wine (huangjiu) association helped plant more than 600 mu (about 40 hectares) of red millet alongside roses and osmanthus, explicitly building a raw-material belt behind the township’s huangjiu industry. In Neixiang County, Taoxi Town hosts an organic red-millet base feeding a producer whose craft is listed as provincial intangible cultural heritage.

The most significant recognition came in September 2025, when Dengzhou was officially designated the “Home of Red Millet in Henan” at a harvest ceremony held in the city’s red-millet demonstration planting base. The same event inaugurated a joint postdoctoral research center on red millet, signaling that the crop now has both a regional brand and a formal scientific apparatus behind it. City officials framed the strategy in a single image: “In the morning we cut the first sheaf in the field; in the afternoon we start the ferment in the workshop — a complete chain from field to palate.”

Three Thousand Years in the Jar

Nanyang’s claim to antiquity is unusually well documented. In 1987, archaeologists in Zhenping County unearthed a Qin-dynasty bronze vessel still containing liquid huangjiu more than 2,200 years old — one of the rarest physical survivals of ancient wine anywhere.

The textual record is equally striking. Zhang Heng, the Eastern Han polymath and Nanyang native, described his hometown’s wine in the Ode to the Southern Capital: “The wine is nine-times-fed sweet nectar, clear after a hundred days… sweet without cloying, intoxicating without hangover.” This is among the earliest written descriptions of the jiu yun method — feeding the mash in successive batches — a technique that Cao Cao later memorialized to Emperor Xian on behalf of a Nanyang magistrate, and which remains the most widely used huangjiu brewing method in China to this day. The physician Zhang Zhongjing prescribed huangjiu as a medicinal vehicle in his Treatise on Cold Damage, leaving behind the folk maxim: “Huangjiu in the morning, vegetables at noon, an evening walk — and a long life.”

How It Is Made

Modern Nanyang producers still follow the古法 (ancient method) sequence: soaking, steaming, pitching into jars, saccharification and fermentation, pressing, clarifying, aging, blending, filtration and sterilization. The distinguishing step is the nine-fold feeding of grain, with primary fermentation around 28–30°C for five to eight days, followed by a long secondary fermentation at 15–20°C lasting roughly two months. Maturation happens in earthen jars — one Xixia producer keeps more than 65,000 jars of vintage wine — yielding the deep amber color, thick mouthfeel and lingering sweetness that characterize the style.

The finished wine is versatile: served at room temperature, warmed to roughly 38°C in the traditional winter manner, or chilled with ice and citrus for younger drinkers.

Policy Winds, and the Road Ahead

Government support has grown steadily. In May 2022, Nanyang huangjiu was written into the Henan Province Alcohol Industry Revitalization Action Plan (2022–2025), the first time the category entered the province’s core liquor strategy. In March 2023, eleven central ministries including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology listed Nanyang huangjiu among the country’s “key local specialty food industry clusters”. Since then, provincial and municipal bodies have convened a series of high-level symposia focused on breeding dedicated brewing varieties of red millet, standardizing technique, developing new products and building a regional brand.

Yet challenges remain candidly acknowledged by local observers. The industry is fragmented — many small players, no dominant national brand — and much of the output still sells in bulk packaging at modest prices, reinforcing a perception of huangjiu as a cheap cooking wine rather than a premium drink. Red-millet supply, though improving, is still weather-exposed and concentrated among contracted smallholders. The current push toward geographic-indication standards, branded bottling, cultural tourism and livestream retail reflects a deliberate effort to move from “a category without a brand” to a name that travels.

A Northern Counterweight

Chinese huangjiu scholarship has long used the phrase “Shaoxing in the south, Nanyang in the north.” Where Shaoxing offers the polished, rice-and-wheat-qu elegance of the Jiangnan school, Nanyang offers something rougher and older: a dark amber millet wine rooted in the Yellow River basin’s farming civilization, tied to the same soil that produced the Han dynasty’s greatest physician and astronomer.

For anyone mapping Chinese wine beyond the familiar, the journey is worth making — to the red millet fields of Dengzhou at harvest, to the jar cellars of Xixia, to a workshop where the mash is still fed nine times, just as Zhang Heng described it nearly two thousand years ago.