Liquor is called "the first of hundreds of medicines", and ancient books call it "soup medicine", which means the earliest wine. Obviously, wine itself is a medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine explains that wine is warm, pungent and bitter, which has the functions of warming blood vessels, dispersing medicine, warming stomach, expelling wind and cold, strengthening yang and relieving fatigue. There is a treatise on decoction and medicine in Huangdi Neijing, which focuses on how to use medicine.
Wine is a good solvent, and many drugs that are difficult to separate effective components by other methods can be extracted by using this characteristic of wine. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that prolonged illness will inevitably lead to deficiency of vital qi and blood stasis, so all kinds of chronic deficiency often have different degrees of qi and blood stasis and meridian stasis. Medicinal liquor contains nourishing and strengthening substances that can replenish blood and qi, nourish yin and warm yang, which is very beneficial to the prevention and treatment of various chronic debilitating diseases because of its own efficacy of pungent dispersing and warming yang.
Chinese medicine has a close relationship with wine. Before wine appeared, people got sick and often invited "witches" to treat diseases. Later, with the development of Chinese medicine, wine gradually faded and became an auxiliary material of Chinese medicine. There is a saying in Huangdi Neijing, the earliest classic of traditional Chinese medicine in China: "Since ancient times, the soup of saints has been fermented for ear use". It can be seen from this sentence that wine, a fermented product, is the earliest Chinese medicine. In a word, in Chinese medicine, wine has evolved from the earliest decoction to the auxiliary material of Chinese medicine, which plays an important role in both oral and external use.