At the end of 19 century, Chen Ruyue resigned and came back to hometown to inherit the family winery. He found out although rice wine tastes savoury and mellow , it was bitter and easy to get drunk. Chen Ruyue noticed that elders loved to eat fat meat during drinkign so he tasted a piece of fat meat and was inspired to use fat meat to make wine.

 
After a series of trial and error, the fat meat wine-making was finally invented which helped to purify rice wine, wiped off the bitter and spicy taste, and even created a unique mellow taste. The fat meat inside the wine looked like a glittering ice and the rice wine was called as Shao Jiu at that time so the wine was named as Rou Bing Shao which meant the ice meat wine. Chen Ruyue thought the meat word was not elegant so he changed it into Yu which meant jade and shared same pronunciation in Cantonese. That was how the name “Yu Bing Shao” came from.

As the earliest export products, Yu Bing Shao was sold oversea in 1917. In the golden age of Chinese local wine industry, Shiwan winery the leader of all those export products.  If we check the newspaper of HongKong in 1950s, we can find Yu Bing Shao was posted 4 times on the front page of HongKong Business and at the center of Chinese famous wine advertisement. This characteristic wine-making is inherited and now becomes one of most famous Chinese wine in the world. In 2013, Chen Ruyue was rated as one of most admirable historical figure in Foshan.

Author | Joey
Revisor | Jersey