The appearance on the market of "DIY sweet rice wine," produced by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC), whose recipe includes a large amount of cane spirit (alcohol derived from sugar-cane mash), has sparked a fierce battle with the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Company (TTWC). Because old "red label" rice wine, produced by the TTWC's predecessor company, included cane spirit, TSC claims its new sweet rice wine to be the authentic "taste of the old hometown." The TTWC counters that the rice-wine component is what genuinely defines a rice wine, and that is not something that just any by-product processing factory can master.

Looking back over the history of distilling in Taiwan, cane spirit was at one time during the Japanese colonial era the most common alcoholic drink of ordinary citizens. It was also one of the main ingredients in Japanese-era rice wine. Now that cane spirit has resurfaced, and moreover is challenging its close relative rice wine for supremacy, one cannot but wonder: What is the story behind sweet wine?

Back in the days of Dutch rule over Taiwan, the area planted with sugar cane reached as high as one-third of the area that was planted with rice. A study by Fan Ya-chun, an MA recipient in history from National Central University, sheds light on the early cane-spirit production process, a by-product of the sugar-making process. To make sugar, cane was chopped and pressed, then heated in a large vat to kill germs. Then slaked lime was added, and the mixture stirred continuously. After cooling and filtering, you had a batch of top-grade sugar. The remaining water was called "first time water." Slaked lime was then added a second and third time, and sugar was filtered out each time; the remaining water was called "second-time" and "third-time" water. Cane spirit, also known as "sugar-water wine" or "slaked lime wine," was a sweet, inexpensive, inferior-grade alcohol made with these three batches of water.

By 1922, when the Japanese colonial monopoly system for tobacco and wine was in place, the highest quality sweet wine, made from first-time water, with 25.5% alcohol content (51 proof), was being called "Sweet Wine No. 1." Cane spirit made using second-time water (61 proof) was called "Sweet Wine No. 2," and that made from third-time water (71 proof) was christened, naturally, "Sweet Wine No. 3." This last was of low quality and had a somewhat rancid odor; it was consumed largely by the lower classes. In 1930, sweet wines No. 1 and No. 2 were renamed "Red Label Sweet Wine" and "Gold Label Sweet Wine" respectively.

In 1937, the Japanese authorities began to phase out cruder forms of distilling, and the production volume of sweet wine declined steadily. Except for the Hualien-Taitung area, in consideration of the high demand among aboriginal peoples for low-cost sweet wine, in other locations production of Red Label was halted and that of Gold Label halved. As war intensified between Japan and China on the mainland, demand for sugar cane to make methanol (industrial use alcohol) forced its price to skyrocket. Consequently, low-cost sweet wine was forced by war into the storage room of history, where it has waited until a new struggle-this time commercial in nature-has again evoked the "spirit" of the past.