Shaoxing's yellow rice wine (huangjiu) has been produced in the city for at least two thousand years, and the traditional distilleries clustered along the canal banks south of the old town are the most serious reason for a visit. Several of the older distilleries — Kuaiji Mountain, Guyue Longshan, and others — accept visitors and run informal tours of their production facilities: the earthenware jar storage halls, the fermentation workshops, and the tasting rooms where the full range from dry young wine to complex twenty-year aged examples can be compared.
The visual experience of a working distillery is remarkable: hall after hall of large earthenware jars stacked three high, sealed with the traditional clay caps and marked with the year of brewing. The smell of rice wine — warm, slightly sweet, fermented but not sharp — pervades the whole district. Serious aged huangjiu is more expensive than its table-wine status in Chinese restaurants might suggest; a good twenty-year wine is comparable in complexity and value to a fine sherry or Madeira.