The first time I encountered one of these strange wines was in southern China […]. It was at the oddly named Snake King & Completely Restaurant in Guangzhou […] When I visited there were 75 different snake dishes on the menu and seventeen different wine drinks that had snake as one of the ingredients. These included something labeled "Magnificant Packing Three Snake Gall Bladder Wine" and, mysteriously, "Toad and Snake's Seminal Vesicle." Timidly, I ordered the more modest "Small Three Snake Wine," a reference to the size of the drink, not the snake.

The waitress watched as I sipped it and applauded as I then emptied the tiny glass in a gulp. It burned going down as a straight shot of tequila---which it resembled in color---or brandy would, and left a residual warm feeling from my esophagus to my gut. Which is what it was supposed to do. Snake is categorized as a yang food, representing the positive, bright and masculine half of the Chinese yin/yang philosophy (yin being negative, dark, and feminine). Its consumption is especially recommended during the winter months, when it is believed it will warm the blood.

[…] I was the only Caucasian in the restaurant, making me as much an oddity as the menu was to me. Most of the customers at the other tables were male and all wanted me to join them for an after-dinner drink. As soon as I joined the first and we all swapped business cards, one of the men filled our glasses with a brown liquid with a worrying residue.

"Ganbei!" ---the traditional Chinese toast is Ganbei! meaning "empty glass"--- the man called loudly. The sediment wasn't so thick as to involve any chewing and the wine went down without the fiery glow I'd experienced earlier.

"Lovely," I said as I examined the bottle, surprised to find on the label some English text. The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that what I'd swallowed was Five Testes & Penises Wine. Besides pure rice wine---the common ingredient in virtually every exotic wine sold in Asia---it contained, I was assured, the genitals of snake, sheep, ox, deer, and dog. The label went on to describe my drink as a "medical healthy-protective product." With a series of gestures and lascivious grins, my new friends made the promised benefits clear: I was drinking Viagra in a bottle. And so I moved from table to table, drinking glass after glass of the same liquid flavored and thickened with fermented genitalia.

[…] In the Imperial Herbal Restaurant in Singapore, a few steps from the Raffles Hotel, a resident Chinese herbalist diagnosed customer ills and imbalances, prescribing certain dishes or drinks on the menu as being helpful. The choice of wines included one with deer penis, starting at US$12 a glass, with a two-liter bottle costing $450! I tried snake wine again at a sidewalk cafe in Sapa, Vietnam, in the mountains near the Chinese border. (I was told that they were out of "bee wine.") It was also in Vietnam, at the Hanoi airport, where I found a bottle of wine containing a gecko the size of a small kitten, priced at $2, next to a bottle that contained a coiled cobra for $80. In the lobby bar of the five-star Baan Boran Hotel in northern Thailand overlooking the Golden Triangle, the bartender poured a shot from a bottle of amber liquid that contained a single scorpion. Like the cobra, also ready to strike, though well past any ability to do so.

The difference between these and other wines is that the special ingredient---reptile or insect or whatever---is added after the drink has been fermented. Snake wine isn't wine made from snake genitalia, it's wine to which those parts have been added for effect, for the impact its presence will make on the drinker, probably only psychologically.

[…] Ingredients for the wines come from all over. A visit to the factory includes a look into ceramic urns containing everything from dead silkworm moths (a tonic for the kidneys) to the penises of seals and sea lions imported from Canada (known as "whips" in Chinese medicinal lingo, believed to increase virility) to fungus (for hypertension) and chicken feet (to strengthen the leg muscles).

*original article