Rice wine plays a major role in Chinese cuisine, possibly coming second only to soy sauce in importance. Made from fermented glutinous rice, rice wine is used to tenderize meat and seafood in marinades, and to impart flavor to food. Rice wine even forms the basis of an herbal soup meant to help new mothers recover quickly after giving birth.Unfortunately, while rice wine is readily available at Chinese/Asian groceries, it is one of the few must-have Chinese ingredients that is not easy to find at regular local supermarkets. And drinking quality rice wine is still hard to find in many parts of North America.Here are some suggested substitutes for rice wine:Pale Dry Sherry – available at liquor stores, this is the most commonly recommended substitute for rice wine. It comes closest in flavor to Shaoxing rice wine (also spelled Shao-hsing or Shaohsing), an amber-colored wine made with glutinous rice, wheat yeast, ​and spring water. Since rice wine can be hard to find, many recipes will only have dry sherry in the ingredients list, not even giving rice wine as an option.

Gin – While Shaoxing rice wine is commonly recommended because of its consistent high quality, there are many types of rice wines in China. wine for mac reviewGin comes closer in flavor to the white rice wines than dry sherry. wine for sale online australiaFeel free to give it a try if you like.list of biggest wine producing countriesCommonly referred to as the Japanese version of rice wine (although it actually has more in common with brewing beer), Sake has a very different flavor than Chinese rice wine. However, some cooks prefer it. It really comes down to personal preference – feel free to give it a try if you like.You can also try use mirin as rice wine substitute. I have also tried to use vodka instead of rice wine to marinaded meat before and the result was satisfying. 

Learn more about rice wineIt wasbound to come to an end eventually. Having spent years fantasising about the cloud of bliss life would be if only I could pass all my Master of Wine exams and “just” have the research paper left, I now find that peachy cloud slowly evaporating and myself settling into the rather less fantastical realisation that there’s still work to do. This is not to say that I don’t find my topic really rather interesting – I more or less took all the sexy topics I could think of and jammed them into one research paper: “selling wine”, “to Chinese”, “millennials” “online” However, with a whole 500 survey responses I need to log before January 31, it begins to occur to me that I really ought to get cracking. Master of Wine student on the power of group study and breaking down blind tasting The research paper is the often glossed over third portion of the Master of Wine exam (technically, yes, it is an exam, even though, thankfully, I’m allowed to do it from the comfort of my home office/cocoon).

When completed, it should be an original piece of research on a wine-related topic that expands the global wine community’s collective knowledge base. While this used to necessitate the gathering of hard data, forcing many a would-be Master of Wine into an unfamiliar world of lab coats, pipettes and conical flasks, mercifully, as of a few years ago, the scope of inquiry has been greatly broadened so that now candidates can delve into subjects as diverse as history, literature and anthropology. Personally, I decided long ago that sticking to what I know (consumer research) was the best way to preserve my sanity this 2016-17 academic year. My inquiry itself is fairly straightforward. The goal is to gauge which particular elements of a wine’s product page are more likely to get somebody to hit “buy now” and which are the digital equivalent of window dressing, i.e. nice to have, but hardly the determining factor. All those close-up shots of bottle punts and unwrinkled foil capsules you will see if you keep scrolling down on a Tmall product page leap to mind, but only the research will tell.

For the sake of nice, round numbers, I have decided that millennials are people aged 20 to 35. I have not limited my pool by geographic or socioeconomic factors, in the hope that we will get an attractively diverse group and be able to draw some conclusions about different categories of millennials (e.g. do 20 to 25 year olds in western China need dramatic visuals or if 30 to 35 year olds in the greater Beijing area abide by community scores). Given millennial internet users in China total around 418 million, surely I can tempt a measly 500 into giving me five minutes of their browsing time? Especially with incentives factored in (a painful, but inevitable part of market research in China, I have been assured again and again). For those of you not particularly turned on by the topic, the reason why Chinese online wine consumers (millennials especially) are the height of research sex appeal is that they are arguably well ahead of their Western counterparts, at least in terms of the percentage of wine sales made online vs in person.

While in the US – a market burdened by labyrinthine interstate alcohol shipping laws – online penetration of the wine market is a mere 3 to 4 per cent by volume, in China it is a whopping 30 per cent and predicted to grow steadily. Even in the relatively well networked UK it is only around 10 per cent. Yet there are certainly headwinds. Anecdotally, many online wine orders are in the one-to-three-bottle range, but the expectation is that shipping will be totally free. The challenge with shipping small orders of wine around a vast country is that wine is heavy, temperature-sensitive and fragile. Once it arrives, it requires special storage, meaning most people avoid massive bulk buys. Meanwhile, trucking within China remains painfully costly. However, things may be about to change. , the China wineAmazon is also re-entering the Chinese online wine sales space, so my guess is that wine e-commerce will continue to tick along nicely – at least, I hope, until I’ve finished this research paper.