It is always a pleasure to cover the annual Sakura JWWA Grand Tasting. The 2025 event was held at Tokyo’s Gajoen Hotel, one of the most attractive hotels in the city. This year there were approximately 700 people in attendance. We encountered a couple of wineries whose output we have extolled in years past and … Continue reading A Rascal and a Villain at the Sakura Grand Tasting →

JFEX 2025, July We wrote about this brewery last year when we encountered them at JFEX. This year we ran into them again, the brewmaster to be precise, and had the opportunity to taste their Sake Premium Beer. This Nagano-based establishment puts out some pretty imaginative brews. For those interested in what we wrote about … Continue reading A JFEX Gem: Yudanaka Brewery’s Sake Premium Beer →

Shiki 2023 is a wine made from 100% Yama-Sauvignon grapes, a hybrid of Yamabudo, a “wild” grape, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Shiki 2023 is produced by Mars Komagatake Distillery, which produces wine along with their more famous whisky. On the same premises is the Minami Shinshu Komagatake Brewery, a sister entity which produces the writer’s favorite … Continue reading Shinshu Miyada Wine Shiki 2023 →

Some of our readers might not be familiar with the term “raw wine,” so we will endeavor to provide a concise explanation for a concept that requires book-length coverage, which is exactly what Isabelle Legeron, the driving force behind the Raw Wine events, provides in her seminal work Natural Wine: an introduction to organic and … Continue reading Encounter at Raw Wine Tokyo 2025: Parra Libre Cinsault →

One of the writers of this blog visited Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia recently on a business trip. During his trip he tried Toddy, a fermented beverage made from the sap of the unopened flowers of palms. —— After several days of engaging meetings and great Malaysian food, I was ready to fly home. However, there was … Continue reading Malaysian toddy →

Famous Generals--Dainippon Meisho Kagami, Chikanobu This is the last installment in our FOODEX 2025 series. Perhaps the naming of this beer was inspired by those military brews of Finland, Togo and Yamamoto beers. This one is named after one of Japan’s great unifiers, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). Personally, we are rather partial to devolution, but we … Continue reading Ieyasu B[eer] →

Before hastily departing the JAL Business Class Lounge at Haneda Airport in order to catch an overseas flight, this bottle on the bar caught my eye. What an unusual beverage, I thought, as indeed it is. A number of things attracted my attention: the bilingual label (Japanese-Spanish), its quasi-Latin American motif, and the word kokuto, … Continue reading Sweet Encounter at Haneda Airport: KOKUTO DE LEQUIO →