Here’s a new one: Vietnamese rice wine! True, it’s been woven deeply into Vietnam’s culture for millennia, but it’s finding a renewed rhythm at Sông Cái Distillery in Hanoi. Sông Cái is the brainchild of Californian-born biological engineer Daniel Nguyen, who landed in Vietnam along with the US advisory team for sustainable development in the Mekong Delta. Moved by a decline in indigenous crops and farms chasing yield over value, he decided to work more closely with foragers and ethnic groups to better understand and preserve heirloom produce.
At Sông Cái, those interests and aims spring to life. The Hanoi-based business is Vietnam’s first fully Vietnamese-owned distillery, winery and fermentation lab, bottling everything from gin and amaro to rice wine and tonics, sodas, miso, soy sauce, vinegar and more. What makes these stand tall is the pinpoint focus on fermentation in play – native yeast cultures, locally sourced bacteria, endemic microbes, all proper wild stuff.
We’ll be damned if these aren’t some of the most untamed, outside-the-box and truly charismatic drinks we’ve ever sold – and we’re pleased as punch to have five cuvées at our disposal for you. Up first, the 2025 ‘Tung Tóe’ Purple Rice Wine Pet Nat, from a rare variety of sticky rice fermented in traditional Vietnamese clay amphora. Yowzers. We’re talking a palate of earthy-sweet purple yams thrown together with bread dough, bananas, tart tropical fruits and a subtle mushroomy twang. It’s a stark contrast to the ‘Bong Bóng’ Sparkling Yellow Rice Wine, a blended method-trad fizz made of yellow flower sticky rice that’s full of aromatic zing: green mangoes and yuzu-tinged acidity given savoury depth from flavours like toasted cashews and funky washed-rind cheese. Gee whiz.
Both those rice varieties come together in the 2025 'Khà’ Yellow Rice Wine, a more traditional expression fermented with the addition of koji and aged on lees for at least 18 months. It’s umami all the way here, reminiscent of Oloroso Sherry, vin jaune and long-aged sake with its miso-like intensity, salted caramel richness and walnut-laced finish.
Aromatised wines in the vein of vermouth have long been used as rituals and remedies in Vietnam, too, and the ‘Sâm’ Aromatized Wine keeps that tradition alive. Yellow flower sticky rice is polished down and enhanced with 12 medicinal botanicals including ginseng and ginger for an all-out flavour attack, zigging and zagging between lemongrass, chamomile, agave, star anise and sandalwood.
Sông Cái’s 'Cảm’ Sweet Purple Rice Wine sends things off on a sweet high. Produced from the first drippings of fermented purple sticky rice, it’s almost like a spoonful of chè đậu đỏ, Vietnam’s famed black-bean dessert, rounded out by the sweetness of adzuki and chocolate-coated peanuts. (Hint: it’s just to drizzle over yoghurt or ice cream as it is to drink.)