Peek along the bottom shelves of Hong Kong supermarkets and grocery stores and you might see a category of booze once popular with both rich and poor: medicinal wines.
Yellow or rice wines infused with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ingredients were well loved among Hongkongers โ they drank them โfor healthโ โ until the 1980s and โ90s.
Some of the better-known medicinal wine labels were Shi Quan Da Bu Jiu โ โthe ten complete wellness wineโ โ from mainland China, and Yomeishu โ โwellness wineโ in Japanese โ from Japan. They even had television advertisements.
While these elixirs sank into obscurity in the decades that followed, bartender Dennis Mak and TCM practitioner James Ting are planning to revive the wines-for-wellness concept.
In 2019, the duo created Magnolia Lab, a drinks brand that combines traditional herbal and medicinal wines with modern mixology.