Awamori Notes

Quite a lot of Awamori has flowed since then. We were bound to go at long last to Yonaguni island, the last tip of Japan before Taiwan, and where they produce some of my favorite brands named as the island (banana flavor). But we ended up closer to Ishigaki, precisely in tiny Taketomi island. They don't produce Awamori there but bring bottles from Ishigaki, and thanks to the mood, it did taste somewhat better than in Tokyo. I have quit reading news about Awamori, sometimes merely skimming a piece of article. The industry news has been boring, the official discourse surrounding the drink stuck in convention, unoriginal. We have yet to go again sometimes in Okinawa and visit a distillery. I have found in Tokyo not far from home a small sake shop with a small selection of Awamori. The funny thing is that the shop is really into the Japanese sake brew and carry Awamori just like wine, that is, to beef up their offer, but as the shop blog tells, they really love rice brew. Yet, what they offer is good, so good actually that I almost exclusively by from them. Sometimes last year, they started carrying some rare expensive bottles of 100% old - 1997 - Awamori. We had some, and later I bought a 12 year old bottle, including one I brought to Paris where it had huge success. But what I really was looking after was a 1996 vintage, because i is the year Ulysse was born. I asked the shop to inquire and they came back with a negative answer. But this year, they have 1997 vintage bottles, and like the rare brands bottle, I believe they don't much sell these. I now have a 1996 bottle hidden somewhere in the appartment we will enjoy when Ulysse turns 20. Aged Awamori is for sure excellent.

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According to the introductory text on Takazato distillery, the majority of the Awamori produced there is locally consumed. The Maruta brand with a big "ta" character - meaning field - has a sweet note that may not be related with the fact that the same place originally produced sugar. It is one of the best tasted Awamori so far, meaning that the top of the chart is already crowded with best bottles.

In the meantime, the Okinawa Times in a usual tepid piece of promotional article reports on the release of a new brand of Awamori named "Shima-omoi" (memories of islands) to be sold first in and around Tokyo. There is more than one can gulp down in the article on the hidden meanings pointing to the hypercentrality of Tokyo that sort of comes to the rescue of an Okinawan distillery to better produce a brand where the naming and concept must be the only novelty to it. So the technic to produce that brand may have been refined by the Asahi technicians to make the beverage fit the delicate, discriminating buds of the Kanto area consumers' mouths. Reducing to 25 the alcoholic degree may also have been the only technical improvement. Being no proponent to any Okinawa freedom movement or whatever, I only see and smile at such literature totally blind on purpose to the roots that allow Awamori to be what it is. Typical is the lip service to the process helping to extract the typical flavors of the local black ferment - kurô kôji - turned blind to the fact that the fermented ingredient that helps Awamori be what it is, is rice - God forbid! - Thai rice.

When we went back to France for Christmas, bringing various bottles of Awamori, everyone we know that tasted it was immediately under the spell, including friends that had lived in Japan, or were born here, but had never so far tried it. Way much better than sake.

I have yet to discover what is behind the selection of about 10 brands at sake shop Kinoeneya in Jimbôchô that say "limited to speciality shops". These Awamori sport a date of bottle filling on the label. Many are at least one year old. But they also have in common to each deliver in its own way a distinctive strong bouquet. Information on what make those flavors distinctive is nil. I'll have to start a conversation with the shop owner next year.

Brands from northern islands are devoid of that banana like hint of the southernmost varieties. The Izena was certainly exceptional, mineral. The Ryusen of central Okinawa was less impressive, yet still a comforting drink before sleeping. After tasting on a special occasion a top of the line almost too rich and famous Kubota sake, the contrast with the lightness of a five years old Suizen Awamori was striking, and not only for my own numbed buds. Everyone around praised the Awamori almost more than the sake.

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This Awamori blog is in low feed mode due to the current physical incapacity of the writer to taste and appreciate the beverage. What a shame. Medecine should find a solution next year. In the meantime, here are a few bits of things and thoughts - some rehashed or refined - grabbed over the past few months.

In Tokyo, Kanda-Jimbôchô liquor shop Kinoeneya has a short and focused selection of Awamori. A stark contrast with Washita official Okinawa products shops that carry mostly every labels under the sun. Since discovering Kinoeneya at a short distance from home, I have bought Awamori from them only. Kinoeneya selection is very much focused on the Ishigaki island production. The first surprise came with the discovery of stamp dated standard clear bottles, mostly from the southern islands of Yonaguni and Ishigaki. Bottles were young, from, 2003 and 2004, priced at standard level. They are part of a selection scheme for which I have found but scarce information, sporting a distinctive small label on the bottle referring to promoting Awamori that are hand-made. Not all selected brands are dated though. Before anosmia storm, I could clearly detect that distinctive banana hint in the Yonaguni bottle. The same shop where I got to yesterday had an old Awamori (Kûsû) of 1988 priced at a whooping 17,000 yen in dark brandy like bottle.

Also read recently in a culinary chronicle of the Yomiuri newspaper in Japanese, a short article about Awamori where the single remarkable thing was the writer mentioning that Awamori is basically made with Thai rice, but that the fact is nowhere mentioned on the bottle. Here is the quote:


何度かの沖縄ブームを経て手軽に飲める泡盛、その割に原料がタイ米とは案外知られていない。原料表示も単に「米こうじ」とあるだけだ。だが、かつて一大交易国として栄えた琉球王朝を象徴する名酒ならば、そのルーツをきちんとラベルに刻むことも、沖縄を知る小さな一助にはなるはずだ。

This writer is right onto the spot already mentioned here. The blindness of Awamori roots that are transnational is simply a shame. I am wondering these days what is the extent of the influence of the main island - Honshû - cold marketers on this matter of fact. After all, in typical fashion where a centralized government despises its remote islands and diversity, the most common references to Okinawa and Awamori seem to endlessly rotate around trade fairs where people drink and munch umi-budô while the younger locals keep dancing in samba hot fashion with never ending reserve of energy. No mind. All physical and sensual. It is the very same discourse one could read about the feet ever-stomping negroes or war faring American Indians. A single snapshot caricature like description of a complex reality.

Unsurprisingly, the official discourse about Okinawa most probably deeply influences the marketing and packaging of Awamori. When a Helios distillery makes a splash with the main brand Kura kept in wood barrels and trying so hard to look like a whiskey bottle, it tells a story kept in the vats of cultural roots denials. Not to deny though that Helios distillery history is of much interest. But the net result is for making the beverage more estranged from its roots than ever. And what about Awamori Nouveau next? Of course, if the roots are what keep at bay potential consumers out of Okinawa, then the disease is more severe than I could imagine.

To come back to that article of the Yomiuri, the writer gives a short hint at the fact that rice from Thailand is mostly bought in single batches by the distillery association that resell it to each single distillery. Mostly a single cargo business? The mystery on that trade is thick, and generates most interest because of the fog.

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Kura of Helios distillery was probably the first Awamori brand I bought and drank on purpose. The bottle design and golden content are pleasing to the eyes. A toast is due to this buds opener. But I am no longer impressed. There is a strategy of roots negation in this product I understand but do not support. After all, Kura was developed for the Japanese market in mind. Awamori in oak barrels is to me as confusing as raising the beverage in the Shetlands and try hard to imagine a Scottish castle owner comfortably sitting in front of the winter fireplace with the labrador snoozing at his feet. It's not about Kura taste but the image that simply does not fit the bill. And that Kura has accumulated over the years a slew of Monde Selection awards doesn't impact my bias toward that bias. But I am not qualified for sure. I am looking for the South-East Asia imagery when choosing an Awamori brand. Kura is foreign in that sense. But the standard Yonaguni - seemingly made out of Thai rather than Taiwanese rice - perfectly fills the dream gap. Smooth and delicately banana like flavored, with all the romanticism of Yonaguni being the most extreme Southern island before Taiwan, a mere 125 km away. Leave the kilt and the labrador away.

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For me, the pleasure of Awamori lays in the narrative trail of a South-Asian path that links together various territories toward one spot, a distillery, where is processed an earthy beverage, in a spot located in a fantasized bunches of islands collectively referred to as Okinawa, or more correctly the Ryûkû. There is a powerfully evocative magic in the beverage I am seeping while typing this note. Some rice paddies in an unknown region of Thailand have produced grains that were separated from the rice stem, maybe polished on the spot, stocked and dried for some time, packages in heavy cloth huge bags, stacked in a cargo ship. The ship left the quay of an unknown Thai port, maybe Bangkok, but I want to think of something less easy to pinpoint on the mind map. It sailed through the South China sea, leisurely eying on the left the coast of Cambodia. It headed north-west toward the Spratly islands, seemingly heading for the Philippines. It shoved past Olongapo, Bangued and Claveria, now clearly looking toward Taiwan. But Kaohsiung was not its port of call. It crossed the Tropic of Cancer in the Philippines Sea then followed the Ryukyu trail, so tiny pieces of ground in the blue of a map that they almost seem invisible at this distance. Then it moored on a quay at Naha port, maybe. The anonymous rice was transfered to smaller boats that sailed on local routes toward various islands. There, they were stacked again on lorries that transported the grain to distilleries. And, the local black kôji, a noble mold, would turn this hard grain into this smooth tangy beverage.

All this trail, all this narrative is missing in the story of Awamori as told locally. The core ingredient is merely referred as an anecdote. It is hard not to think that the shunning at all this is due to the usual ethnocentrism of Japan. I am curious to know to what extend this ethnocentrism is that of the Ryukyu islands or that of the central islands that are seemingly monopolizing the discourse about Okinawa. In the most stripped out version of Okinawa merchandizing as seen on a poster the other day in the Tokyo subway, Okinawa was a hotel with blue sky, blue sea, blue everything, and supposedly lavish Western food. The hotel itself in fuzzy setting was your usual ugly condominium that mares the landscape, unless you stay there and look out toward the sea.

Gentrification of Awamori is rampant. Rarety does not explain the phenomenon. Gazillions of liters of Awamori are produced, thanks in part as it seems to the current boom.

There are stories of ventures trying and expand the interest for the Okinawan national alcoholic beverage beyond the Pacific Ocean, with price tags that can be outrageous. Looking for once in the neighborhood for Awamori, I found a nearby shop with a small selection of brands most of which can't even be seen in the official Okinawa products shops in town. One surprising - at least for me - discovery was a bottle from a distillery in Ishigaki island sporting a year of production. 2003. The year of the wave heat in Europe. Unrelated with this bottle that offers that mineral tanginess related in readings from local sources but never much detected by my sleepy taste buds so far.

Awamori bottles do not usually specify a date of production. The gentrification is probably fueled by the longing for that very old Awamori referred to in writings about dreamed about stocks of the beverage of more than 100 years of age that were destroyed during the the WWII. Even the most expensive kûsû, or old spirit, do not indicate a year of production. The meaning of a 10 years aged Awamori is a mystery beyond the producers and the people of the inner circles.

Found in that shop in the vicinity is a bottle of Yonaguni, from the island of the same name. It is not dated. There is however a date of bottling. The distillery sells a variety already introduced in a previous note, made with Taiwanese rice. This one I assume is made with the standard Thai rice. I have not tried it yet, but as far as images are concerned, Yonaguni being the most southern island of the Japanese archipelago, the last one before Taiwan at less than 200 km away, that mere georgraphical fact makes the expectation for exoticism incredibly strong. Another bottle from the same island I had been looking so far without luck is that one with a huge butterfly set on a lush tropical green forest. Interestingly enough, the dated and non-dated bottles are about the same prices. Differentiation is still in its early age, which is a good thing.