Speaking of Tequila and its little submerged worms, there is the Chinese drink that most fascinates and revolts most foreigners: snake wine. It is generally a rice wine bottled with one or more submerged snakes. Most Chinese, especially younger ones, do not drink it, but you find it in many restaurants and can buy it around the country and region.
In China there are three snake wines, five snake wines and others. (They also have wines made of intimate body parts that shall go unidentified, though Paul Simon was probably alluding to this wine in one of his comments.) In Chinese restaurants you often find snake wine in huge, broad-necked bottles or jars, the snake or snakes, often quite large, flopped at the bottom but sometimes filling a major portion of the jar. The restaurateur usually ladles out as much as you want. Or you can buy it in smaller bottles to take home with you. A clown on one tour I led on the Li River through the spectacular first mountains quaffed a bottle of one-snake wine and then grabbed the snake by its "tail" and dramatically lowered it slowly into his mouth like a circus sword swallower, the boat-load of his friends loudly gasping at (and cheering on) the stunt. Some of this snake wine really isn't bad and if it were decanted and peddled in a separate bottle with a name like Martel (and no snakes), some Westerners might even find it good, though for most it would still be a taste that would require some cultivating. Some snake wines have other items added. Two weeks ago in Vietnam I stopped at a small restaurant between Da Nang and Hue and found tiny sea horses packaged for sale, intended for soaking in and flavoring wine. I couldn't find much snake wine in Singapore's "Chinatown" (the traditional "Chinatown" since, of course, Singapore itself is a "Chinatown") besides simple bottles with miserable worm-like snakes flopped on the bottom. (I confess I didn't really look very hard.) Vietnam (and Laos, which sold Vietnam-bottled snake wine) was a different matter altogether. There the snake was very artistically coiled with its head stretching up to the top of the bottle, tongue out, peering through the wine and challenging anyone to take a sip.
