The Yamazaki whiskey distillery, Japan’s oldest, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year as the country’s most prestigious bottles fetch exorbitant prices due to growing demand and ongoing shortages.
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Located at the foot of a mountain near Kyoto (West), the distillery was founded by Shinjiro Torii, founder of the Suntory beverage group, who wanted to develop a whiskey suited to the Japanese palate.
But above all, foreign demand and the shortage of the highest valued bottles have caused prices to rise in recent years.
In 2020, a rare bottle of Yamazaki 55 sold for around US$800,000 at an auction in Hong Kong, a historic record for a Japanese whiskey.
The global enthusiasm for Japanese whiskeys has led to a “spectacular” increase in production at Yamazaki over the past twenty years, says Takahisa Fujii, the distillery manager.
Suntory has also decided to invest 10 billion yen ($70 million) in its Yamazaki and Hakushu distilleries this year to increase their production capacity.
But at Yamazaki Distillery, visitors looking to stock up on aged whiskey often leave the distillery in frustration, just as Peter Kaleta, a bar manager in Poland, is dejected at not having found one of his favourites.
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Rated bars
Junpei Kusunoki, manager of the Tokyo Whiskey Library, a bar in Omotesando – another chic area of the Japanese capital – is also suffering from the shortage.
“There is a quota [d’approvisionnement, NDLR] For the Omotesando area it is therefore a war against competitors. “We try everything to get hold of the most coveted bottles,” he says.
According to Mr. Fujii, the secret of the quality of Yamazaki whiskeys lies in the particularly pure water of the distillery’s region, whose reputation dates back to the 16th century when the famous tea master Sen no Rikyu settled there.
“You can’t make a good spirit without quality water,” he recalls, adding that the surrounding humidity and mist help the whiskey mature.
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According to critic Mamoru Tsuchiya, there are now around 100 distilleries in Japan and the country’s reputation for the quality of its products is helping to raise awareness of its whiskeys.
Behind this success, however, lies a troubled past: the Japanese whiskey industry has long suffered from the decline in domestic consumption, having peaked in 1983.
That downturn lasted “more than twenty years” and its impact on the industry was “profound,” recalls Nobuyuki Akiyama, director of whiskey marketing at Suntory.
“Lost in Translation” effect
The situation only improved from the early 2000s, when Nikka Whiskey’s Yoichi 10 and Yamazaki 12 received prestigious world awards.
In 2003, Suntory’s Hibiki 17 appeared in Sofia Coppola’s hit film Lost in Translation, in which actor Bill Murray endorses him in a cult scene full of irony.
Domestic sales have also recovered, thanks in part to the return of the fashion for “highballs”, whiskey diluted with mineral water.
The 2014-2015 Japanese TV series about the romantic life of Masataka Taketsuru, the founder of Nikka Whisky, also helped to rekindle interest in this brandy in the archipelago.
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The success came too suddenly for the manufacturers, who had to plan their production decades in advance.
“We have the Hibiki 30, for example, where we have to think about how many bottles we have to produce in 30 years,” says Akiyama, adding that “it’s impossible to predict the market in the future.”
In the short term, sales should continue to rise. Japanese whiskey exports reached 56 billion yen in 2022, 14 times more than a decade ago.