Baijiu goes for the gold

Zhong Kai, associate research fellow with China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment, writes on a popular-science website, Guokr.com: "It's hard to say why it is necessary to add gold flakes, though it's proved to cause no harm within the safety limit and procedure."

Experts have dismissed most rumors about the safety of gold-enhanced liquors. Goldschlager was long-rumored to enter the bloodstream faster than plain schnapps because the gold flakes supposedly made small cuts in the drinker's throat and stomach lining. Experts say gold is too soft to make such cuts, and The Savory blog was quick to ridicule the get-drunk-faster theory as "just one step further from pulling up to a bar, cutting your hand open and pouring whisky into the wound".

The idea of gold-plated baijiu does have fans in some luxury hotels, however. Chocolates decorated with gold are still proffered by top pastry chefs, and gold flakes are likely to swirl in champagne glasses around the world this weekend for Valentine's Day. So why not put some glitter in baijiu?

That's the question embraced by the Taiwan-based biotech firm Gold Nanotech Inc, which announced in late January that it had received notification of compliance from the European Union's food additive regulator for its gold-flake product, which it sells to makers of cosmetics, food and beverages. The certification not only means more credibility in Europe, where most of its customers are based, but in India and China, where it sees most of its growth potential.

"In China, they want to see that other countries have recognized your product first," company president Alex Chen told the trade publication Biotech East. "I believe that the China market will eventually make up more than 80 percent of GNT's business in Asia."

Most of the blogosphere, however, has yet to be convinced.

"Gold just passes straight through the body," a netizen identified as ToastMe wrote last week. "Why pay extra just to have sparkly poop the next morning?"