black vinegar

Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China; aromatic black rice vinegar built by 固态分层发酵, solid-state layered fermentation, and made by the Hengshun house founded there in 1840, inside a Chinese vinegar-making tradition thousands of years older than the regional product itself

Produced in Jiangsu and held largely within Chinese food systems, then carried worldwide by the diaspora; protected in China from 2001 and in the European Union from 2012

Zhenjiang black vinegar is to Chinese cooking what balsamic is to Italian, and the comparison is not a figure of speech: both hold EU Protected Geographical Indication under the same 2012 instrument. But the designation that matters most here is the Chinese one. Zhu Zhaohuai founded the Zhu Hengshun distillery at Dantu in 1840 making rice wine, turned to vinegar from the spent grains around 1850, and the method he arrived at, solid-state layered fermentation across three stages and more than forty steps, entered the first national intangible heritage inventory in May 2006. Chinese vinegar-making goes back to the Zhou. This product does not, and it is worth being exact: what is protected is about 180 years old and named after the man who built it. The same market logic that turned traditional balsamic into coloured wine vinegar turns this into undifferentiated dark cooking vinegar. The quality gap is enormous. The consumer is rarely told.