Content with the tag: Suntory

Japanese whisky production up for the first time in a decade

An end to Japan­ese whisky market’s decade long reces­sion may be in sight. Or am I get over excited over a blip on a graph? Accord­ing to a report in the Asahi Shim­bun, Japan­ese whisky pro­duc­tion increased for the first time in 11 years in 2009.

Ship­ments increased 10.3 per cent. The last time we saw in increase of more than 10 per cent was way back in 1983, the high-water mark the Japan­ese whisky boom.

Domes­tic con­sump­tion is up, partly due to some highly suc­cess­ful cam­paigns to push whisky based mixed drinks includ­ing high­balls, but exports are also in unprece­dented good health. Accord­ing to the Asahi report, Sun­tory exported 106,000 cases last year, up 17 per cent and Nikka saw a 11 per cent increase in Euro­pean sales. The Asahi Shim­bun says Nikka plans to increase its whisky exports 40 per cent next year to 25,000 cases.

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Kirin and Suntory will not merge

Sun­tory and Kirin have called off their merger talks.

The stick­ing point appears to have been the con­trol­ling stake that the fam­ily that owns Sun­tory would have had in the new struc­ture. The merger was attempt­ing to bring together a pub­licly listed com­pany (Kirin) and a rel­a­tively small but almost com­pletely family-owned pri­vate com­pany (Sun­tory). The Sun­tory fam­ily would have ended up with a con­trol­ling hold­ing of about a third of shares in the new entity. This was evi­dently too much for Kirin’s exist­ing man­age­ment and own­ers. (Update: Wall Street Jour­nal has a quote from a Kirin spokesper­son: “We not only dis­agreed on the merger ratio. We could not reach an accord because of var­i­ous other fac­tors, and decided that we can­not see the new entity main­tain­ing inde­pen­dence and trans­parency as a pub­lic company.”)

As I say, the news is good for whisky lovers. The merger would have joined Kirin’s rel­a­tively weak whisky oper­a­tion (Fuji–Gotemba and Karuizawa) and Suntory’s very strong dis­til­leries (Yamazaki and Hakushu) in a stagnant/declining mar­ket. Some sort of ratio­nal­i­sa­tion would prob­a­bly have been on the cards.

From a whisky per­spec­tive (only a sideshow in this deal), the main point of inter­est mov­ing for­ward is whether Kirin is going to get itself a cogent whisky strat­egy. As it is, they seem to be sidelin­ing their strongest sin­gle malt brand (Karuizawa) and yet not really push­ing any­thing con­vinc­ing out of their mass mar­ket whisky facil­ity at Fuji–Gotemba (which is under­stand­able, because the chal­lenge of get­ting them­selves ahead of Sun­tory and Nikka’s domes­tic whisky brands is going to be extremely difficult.)

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The unbearable lightness of being a whisky highball

High­ball bill­boards in Shin­juku, Tokyo.

There is a really good arti­cle in Metrop­o­lis Mag­a­zine by Nicholas Coldicott telling the story of “how Japan’s least fash­ion­able drink came back from the grave”: the whisky highball.

As Nicholas says, the high­ball was extremely pop­u­lar dur­ing the golden age of whisky drink­ing in Japan, between the 1960s and 80s. I’ve quoted this before but Eiji Eigawa at the Jūsō Torys Bar described the salaryman’s drink­ing cul­ture of that period: “The boss used come in and order a high­ball. Then, every­body with him would order a high­ball, right down to the newest guy in the office. It’s not like that now. The youngest guy will order a sin­gle malt”.

One of the rea­sons why whisky sales have being falling for the last decade is pos­si­bly because a high­ball (and the sim­i­lar mizuwari, see below) does not have any­thing like the same func­tion as a sin­gle malt. It is a clumsy way to put it but what I mean by “func­tion” is the role a drink has in an evening: whether it is a easy starter drink, a post pran­dial sip, a chaser etc..

A high­ball is prob­a­bly best com­pared to a Japan­ese lager: it is a light, refresh­ing drink that clears the mouth. In Japan, whole groups of drinkers will often order a “tori­aezu beer” when they enter a bar. This loosely trans­lates as an “in the mean time beer”. Basi­cally, it is an easy, refresh­ing, and inof­fen­sive drink that can be ordered quickly on first arrival at a bar before every­one takes a look at the menu. Every­body toasts with the “tori­aezu beer” and then orders their own stuff (which, of course, will often con­tinue along the light pilsener line). What has hap­pened over the last decade or so is that whisky’s slice of the “tori­aezu” mar­ket has shrunk dras­ti­cally, dis­placed by lagers and very cheap “hap­poshu” quasi-lagers and it has retreated into a role as a late night sip, to be mulled over and appre­ci­ated. That is great for whisky afi­ciona­dos, because the whisky has to be superb qual­ity, but it is not so good for the whisky mak­ers’ profits.

Well, Sun­tory, Japan’s biggest whisky firm, have been bang­ing away for more than a year now with a major adver­tis­ing cam­paign aimed at wind­ing back the years:

The actress is Koyuki and is very well known in Japan.

An inter­est­ing side­note on the Sun­tory cam­paign: one of the rea­sons they decided to go for the high­ball for their nos­tal­gia blast, rather than that other great sta­ple of golden age Japan­ese whisky, the mizuwari, was because they felt they could con­trol the qual­ity of the water that went into the high­ball. Hiroyoshi Miyamoto, gen­eral man­ager of Suntory’s Yamazaki dis­tillery, told me: “Water is get­ting worse over the years in Japan. We always try to edu­cate peo­ple to use min­eral water but if you are dilut­ing with bad tast­ing water it is spoil­ing the flavours regard­less of how good the whisky is.” The high­ball cam­paign, on the other hand, comes with soda water pro­duced by Sun­tory itself. The cam­paign is hav­ing some suc­cess. Sales of Kaku­bin, the clas­sic whisky fea­tured in the cam­paign, jumped 13 per cent last year com­pared to 2007.

Of course, Sun­tory does not have a monop­oly on the highball.　The famous “Sam­boa” fam­ily of bars in Kan­sai has made a spe­cial­ity of them. Tat­sumi Nak­a­gawa, at the Gion Sam­boa in Kyoto, makes two types: one with ice sim­i­lar to Koyuki’s recipe in the ad above and a clas­sic recipe with­out ice. The whisky is refrig­er­ated (this may have been the inspi­ra­tion for the cold whisky in the ad) to remove the need for ice and there­fore the cer­tainty of dilu­tion as the drink warms. Wilkin­son Tansan (1,2), a brand set up by the Briton J. Clifford-Wilkinson in 1889 and now owned by Suntory’s com­peti­tor Asahi, is the pre­ferred soda.

The clas­sic recipe:

Cold glass. First, a dou­ble whisky, then the Wilkinson’s tansan, then a twist of lemon. It is as sim­ple as that. You can get high­balls in the Sam­boa tra­di­tion at Rock­fish in Tokyo (see the Metrop­o­lis arti­cle for details) and in any of the 11 Sam­boa bars in Kan­sai (no cen­tral web­site but Gion Sam­boa is at 570 Gion-Minamigawa, Yuraku-cho, Higashiyama-Ku, Kyoto; 075–541-7509.)

Tat­sumi Nak­a­gawa at Gion Samboa

Or you could just save all the fuss and buy the Sun­tory Kaku-Highball ready made!!??

He liked it and thinks it is going to stomp all over the beer mar­ket!! Hmmm.

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Big Brother: Yamazaki 1984

Update: John Hansell also has a review of this up. He liked it too.I am ashamed to say that I have been slow with my cov­er­age of the Yamazaki 1984. Shame is not too strong a word because I am con­vinced this whisky is des­tined to win some very big plaud…

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Hibiki 12

Update 22.7.09: John Hansell has a review of Hibiki 12 on his blog. (And we also had more impres­sions on this Non­jatta post.) The piece below was orig­i­nally posted on Tues­day, April 28, 2009 but reposted because of John’s review.Another heavy­weight joi…

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Kirin and Suntory in merger talks

The first and the third biggest Japan­ese whisky mak­ers are dis­cussing a merger, accord­ing to the Asahi Shin­bun newspaper.　(Correction: I think this was actu­ally orig­i­nally from Nikkei)If the deal between Kirin and Sun­tory comes off, it will cre­ate on…

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Hakushu distillery

In 1973, Sun­tory built the Hakushu dis­tillery at the foot of Mt. Kaiko­ma­gatake in the South­ern Japan Alps. It devel­oped an unpar­al­leled vari­ety of malt whiskies and highly refined tech­niques in these two utopias of whisky, and brought to market…

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Bowmore Distillery

Bow­more (pro­nounced “Boh-more”) is a dis­tillery that pro­duces sin­gle malt scotch whisky on the isle of Islay, an island of the Inner Hebrides. The dis­tillery, which lies on the South East­ern shore of Loch Indaal, is one of the oldest…

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Glen Garioch Distillery

Glen Gar­i­och (pro­nounced “Geery”), is one of the old­est whisky dis­til­leries in Scot­land, dat­ing back to 1785. It is oper­ated by Mor­ri­son Bow­more Dis­tillers, which is owned by the Japan­ese com­pany, Sun­tory. The dis­tillery was moth­balled in 1995, but reopened…

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