Jim Rion is a certified kikisake-shi (sommelier of sake) and has lived in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Japan) since 2004. He started writing about sake during the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. He decided to document the 23 breweries that are part of Yamaguchi Prefecture (*). Read on and see what BKWine Magazine’s guest writer Chloé Cazaux Grandpierre says about Jim Rion’s new book “Discovering Yamaguchi Sake: A Taster’s Guide to Breweries, Culture, and Terrain”.
This book review is written by Chloé Cazaux Grandpierre, a Saké Sommelier Association (SSA) saké sommelier and an SSA certified saké educator. She is also an expert wine guide and wine writer. Chloé lives in Bordeaux. She can be found here: Chloé & Wines.
For the first time, we have a book that is deep diving into one and only one Prefecture, even if it is not the first one that comes to mind when discussing sake.
Jim teaches us about the five sub-regions of Yamaguchi and its breweries. It is highly interesting and cleverly written as it acknowledges the Prefecture’s history with good and bad times, allowing us to understand where the breweries are coming from.
Moreover, we discover the production methods and philosophies of each kura (brewery) through interviews : the master brewer (toji) or the owner (kuramoto) give their insights but also their best saké picks. This is particularly nice if we want to sip while reading the book.
At the end of the book, you will discover a mini-sightseeing of the writer’s favourite places, preparing us to travel to Yamaguchi Prefecture.
This book is not for sake beginners nor sake professionals. It is for the one who is curious to get the feeling of a sake region. It is a very nice way to discover a prefecture and to highlight the famous and hot topic of the notion of terroir in Japanese sake.
I would have loved to see pictures in colours, though, to get the flair of each kura even more. Now, I ask myself: is this book the beginning of a series of books about each prefecture, or is it a single shot for Yamaguchi?
(*) Ed. note: Japan is, from an administrative point of view, divided into nine regions which are then in total split into 47 prefectures, in some ways similar to the French departments. Yamaguchi is the southernmost tip of Honshu, Japan’s biggest island, the so-called mainland.
