Day 83 - Malt

Japanese whisky has been a constant presence in our trip, first and foremost because Pete and I are big fans of the amber spirit but also because the quality and value of the local malts happen to be exceptional. We have also managed to stay within a tight budget (nothing over 5000 yen, about 30 pounds) but we are getting better at spending it wisely - the Nikka Pure Malt we bought at a 7-Eleven in Naoshima is worth roughly half of the Suntory Royal 15 we stumbled across in Tanabe, but we paid almost the same for the two bottles. More importantly, one of the key reasons that led us to give up on our Kumano Kodo plans was the dangerously low whisky levels we were working with at that point, severely increasing the risk of our endeavour going terribly wrong.

For these reasons our trip would not be complete without a visit to a distillery, so we booked a free tour of Suntory’s flagship plant Yamazaki, the oldest in Japan - deeply regretting not planning further in advance, as the full-on factory tour had been sold out for months. This led to an impressively early start for our standards, as we left the house just after 9am and were on a train that should have got us to the distillery ten minutes before the start of our tour. Halfway through the train journey it became obvious that something was wrong, as we were spending ten minutes standing still at some stations, until we eventually stopped at a random station for good and, after an announcement in Japanese, everyone got off the train. In the end we made it to the distillery an hour later than planned, meaning we had to conduct our own private tour of the museum.

The history of the Suntory group is quite impressive, as everything started with something called Akadama Port Wine (since then renamed “Sweet Wine” because Port is, you know, from Porto) and in one hundred years Japan went from having no domestically produced Whisky to making some of the best in the World. The Museum itself is reasonably informative and well thought through, but in reality it just left us wanting to do the factory tour even more. Nevertheless, walking along their “whisky library” trying to find some of our favourites was good fun, while tasting three different ages of Yamazaki Single Malt made the trip worthwhile - even though it was barely 1pm… The scenery around the distillery is quiet but beautiful, with the surrounding hills providing plenty of sources for the crystalline water necessary to produce great whisky.

Upon returning to Osaka, on a substantially more trivial train journey, we quickly grabbed some ramen and headed to the Umeda Sky Building - two interconnected towers with a rooftop observation deck - for a pretty epic sunset with great views of the entire prefecture. The seemingly infinite ocean of low-level side streets occasionally torn by clusters of high-rise buildings, split in two by a wide river and surrounded by towering mountains, provided an outstanding foreground for a very colourful sunset - sadly one of our last in the land of the rising sun. Leaving Osaka in itself does not exactly break my heart, but the fact that it is the last stop on our little tour of Japan is enough to warrant some premature melancholia while looking at a dusky red sky.

The day ended with Pete heading to the hostel for a Takoyaki party, where he learned how to make octopus balls that are not exactly my cup of tea, while I grabbed dinner with a friend at the crazy Yakitori Pete and I had found on our first stop in Osaka. When I got back to the hostel, a group consisting of Pete, a Japanese girl, a Chinese PhD student, an Italian guy on an endless trip and a grumpy Belgian old man (who was actually saying nice and sensible things most of the time, but sounded very unhappy with the World) was hanging out in the common area. After a round of colour-Jenga, which I lost after a fateful roll of the die, we called it a night over a quick dram of Nikka Pure Malt, nicely completing two circles in one go.

Cheers,
J-Wowww