My trip has been much more packed with activities than I imagined and I’ve meet some remarkable people who I’d like to spend more time with. I’ll write about my great experiences in Fukuoka soon, but I wanted to start with Kagoshima. Seikai Ishizuka, the shochu tasting contest champion, has been an amazing friend and translator to me on this trip. Yesterday we moved from Fukuoka to Kagoshima, the home of imo (sweet potato) shochu. Our shochu education took a great leap forward even before we left the Shinkansen (high speed train) station.
Satsuma Bar, inside the station, has more than 120 shochus available. We got a tasting set and managed to try 5 new shochus before we even left the station. We met our guide Akiko at the hotel. After a brief interview with a local journalist we went to Yatai Mura, a rabbit warren of small dining stalls where we had an absolutely amazing sushi lunch of local fish, shrimp, and octopus. While there we saw the governor of Kagoshima prefecture and serendipitously met the president of Shiragane Shuzo. She invited us to come back for a visit in the fall.
We then had a complimentary tasting at Ishinkan shochuya (shochu shop), which features more than 1,000 different shochus. We didn’t try all of them, but we did try many and then had a shopping spree that included bottles, glassware, a joka (pot for making warm shochu), and t-shirts. We met the shop manager and our guide for dinner at Rockwell’s – an izakaya with more than 300 shochus available. It was completely empty when we arrived, yet about midnight a part of 16 people showed up for dinner. It’s hard for me to imagine that in New York on a Thursday night (0r any night).
We then moved on to Ishizue, which might be the best shochu bar in the world. 520 shochus from Kagoshima prefecture alone. The owner, Yoichi Ikehata, (pictured above along with myself & Seikai) is an encyclopedia of knowledge about the history of the spirit as well as each and every distillery in his prefecture (more than 120 “major” distilleries). He used to work at a shochu kura (distillery) before opening his own bar.
By the end of the night we’d tried 54 different shochus. I didn’t even know that was possible in a single day.
Today we visit Satsuma Shuzo, the 2nd largest shochu producer in the world. Tomorrow we visit Komasa Shuzo accompanied by Japanese TV & radio crews. The next day I fly to Okinawa to begin my Awamori education. I imagine I will spend a lot more time in Kagoshima in the future. These warm, generous people take shochu to a whole different level from the rest of Japan.
Kampai!