FIRST JOURNEYS - 80 GINS AROUND THE WORLD - PIN 43 OF 80
WA GIN, Ibaraki, Japan
AROUND THE WORLD, ONE BOTTLE AT A TIME,
PHILEAS FOGG WOULD SURELY APPROVE
A gin with a ten-year-old sake spirit at its heart, wrapped in Japanese art, language and tradition — this is one bottle I'm rather reluctant to open!
I'm very unlikely to be able to replace it, so when I do eventually open it, I'm going to want to enjoy it to the fullest and opening it during this 80-day tour is not the right time! However, when I do I'd definitely be enjoying some Washoku with it. You're probably saying "huh?", but do read on!
My eldest is learning Japanese in advance of a trip there and I questioned him as to what Wa meant, as I couldn't find much when googling.
It's the Kanji 和, which can mean peace, harmony or Japanese, while shoku (食) means food or eating.
Hence Washoku means Japanese-style food or cuisine.
Kanji are the Chinese characters adopted into the Japanese writing system and are used alongside hiragana and katakana, which are phonetic scripts.
Kanji generally represent words or concepts rather than individual sounds and were introduced to Japan from China centuries ago, eventually becoming an integral part of written Japanese.
So now that the language lesson is out of the way, let me tell you what I know about Wa Gin!
Wa Gin was made by Meiri Shurui in Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, and was launched as a very limited-edition gin in 2017. What makes it particularly unusual is the base: sake is distilled and then the resulting spirit is matured for 10 years before being redistilled with seven botanicals. The botanicals include juniper, lemon peel, orange peel and cinnamon, along with three others, and the finished gin is bottled at 45% ABV. The ten-year-aged sake-derived spirit gives it a wonderfully smooth and rounded character and, when it was released, made it one of the oldest gin base spirits of its kind in Japan.
Due to the sake base, this was marketed as a premium gin and the presentation certainly lives up to that. The label features a traditional
ukiyo-e design by Utagawa Hiroshige, one of Japan's great masters of woodblock printing. The image is Suijin Shrine and Massaki on the Sumida River, from his famous series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and dates from 1856. It's a beautiful connection between a very modern Japanese gin and an artwork from the Edo period.
There is something rather lovely about the whole concept — Japanese sake, ten years of patience, traditional botanicals and a piece of Japanese art all brought together in one bottle.
Kanpai!
"Art, language and tradition wrapped up in a bottle."
"Show me a bottle
and I'll tell you a story."