SEP 26: Dissecting terroir with Chiyo Shuzo & Fujii Shuzo- a philosophical take

Left: Fujii Shuzo — father and son; right: Chiyo Shuzo's Tetsuya Sakai

Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of a place is a great reality.

D.H. Lawrence

Alright, I need an "easy" theme this month. Behind the scenes at Sunflower a lot of enormous wheels are turning, Fuyu Fest planning is well underway, and our team members are preparing for Fall-Winter trips to Japan. October's club will bring a newsletter update with notes from each of us. For now, I need a theme I can write ten pages on without effort!

Thus, it's finally time to address that most controversial debate of esoteric connoisseurs: whether terroir exists in sake — and if so, in what capacity. Who has weighed in on this conversation? Which comments are informed, and which are noise? What is terroir? Who are the stakeholders — who even cares — and why?

For starters, my qualifications. I think it's fair to include a high school job at a health food store, my husband's early career in food and cooking, and my short career in wine (harvest at Union Wine Co, helping out at friends' vineyards periodically, WSET Diploma in wine, wine sales rep for 16 months, my husband's short-lived Japanese wine import business.) This, followed by opening a bar and retail store at Sunflower Sake + associated writing and research, Sake Scholar Course (SSC), Advanced Sake Professional (ASP), WSET Sake 3, ~50 sake breweries visited, ~50 wineries visited, and countless pages read on both beverages + historical/social context. I'm not a deep expert on either, to be clear — but I'm well versed in both, and well read. I feel more qualified to speak on this than pure-sake experts, and more qualified than pure-wine experts.

When I was in high school, an SF Bay suburb just being itself, the pedantic debate was over soy milk, rice milk, and other nondairy milks. In 2002 milk was suddenly a sacred term, insidiously commandeered by PETA and its ilk to dupe consumers into buying plant-based simulacra. I felt then as I do now that this resistance to changing language is reactionary; tomorrow's "milk" is not today's milk, just as yesterday's sushi is not today's (sushi began as barrels of fermented fish), and tomorrow's terroir is not Burgundy ca. 1300AD. Language evolves with changing times. So anyway, let's start with language.

An overhead view of walled-in clos within Beaune, a village in Burgundy (decantertours.com)

"Teh-wah": Wind and Earth

For those unfamiliar, "terroir" is a French term which concerns the differences between wines made from grapes grown in different areas. The term arose in Burgundy around the 12th century as monks cultivated the land around abbeys, producing wine for the sacrament (and more). They found that different plots produced better or worse wines, and over time the degree of specificity grew (or shrank): plots as small as 10,000 square feet (Clos de Derrière Saint-Jean in Pommard, 0.096ha), or as large as >50ha, were delineated and mapped, sometimes even enclosed by short walls (clos). The best wines went to members at the top of the religious order or to royalty. Even beyond rankings of quality, different terroirs: individual clos, climats, lieu-dit, villages, or even larger regions, developed distinct identities with unifying features. Certain terroirs gave rise to spice notes, violets, forestry notes, higher or lower tannins, higher or lower acidity, consistently year to year and irrespective of other factors. The whole of this concept was termed terroir (from latin terra, earth) in Burgundy, but the idea itself was understood in other areas of ancient Europe as well, for example Tokaj in Hungary, home to the world's first vineyard classification system — predating even Bordeaux and Burgundy. As long as there has been wine, it has been intuitively understood that certain plots — sometimes as close as neighbors — produce better wines than others. The term for this phenomenon throughout the wine world — at this point, far beyond France — grew to be known as terroir.

This is a convenient word!

It's also eurocentric, colonial, which means it has been adopted globally, more readily, than nearly-equivalent concepts and terms from Asia, and surely elsewhere in the world.

10 principles of terroir (風土) ingredients — unitas.me

The Japanese concept 風土 fuudo — borrowed from the Chinese 風土 Feng tu — translating to wind and earth, is found in documents dating to the Han dynasty (~200BC) to describe the products of a place. Since the Song dynasty (960–1270AD) Chinese scholars have recorded how local environments shaped tea quality through the natural environment and regional specialization. Song dynasty scholars built upon earlier works that simply organized and described tea according to place; Wang Fu's 王敷 (c. 742–756) Chajiu lun 茶酒論 (Discussion between tea and wine) mapped the geography of famous teas and wines during ~650AD, drawing a connection between place and quality. But in the Song, this scholarship expanded to include notes on environmental, cultural, climatological, and other factors affecting tea production. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Chinese History describe how:

The imperial patronage of Beiyuan tea led to extensive connoisseurship writing. In total, eleven works on Beiyuan tea were composed between the late eleventh and twelfth centuries... The case of Beiyuan tea reveals the emergence of a distinctly Chinese rhetoric of terroir, one that transformed environmental description into a rhetoric that mediated between local expertise and imperial order. Within this framework, place itself came to embody quality, integrating physical environment, cultural identity, and sensory experience.

Terroir — the word, not the idea — is only truly defined and understood in France, where it is used prodigiously; a drive through the countryside will find all manner of signage advertising "produits du terroir" enticing travelers to stop and enjoy the local specialties, by no means limited to wine. The famous enologist Alain Carbonneau of Montpellier's Institut Superieur de la Vigne et du Vin offered a definition in the early '90s:

Examination of a french dictionary will yield the following: Terroir (from terre or land): Land as considered from an agricultural standpoint. Territory used by a village or rural community for growing crops. Gout de terroir: the aromas and tastes specific to wines of a given area. The etymology of the word terroir is not all that clear, since its origins in popular language are complex and in all likelihood rather recent… terroir depends on the ecological, geological and pedagogical characteristics of the site. We can thus define "terroir" as the interaction of climate, [grape] variety and the soil.

But wait — this leaves out the human element. Even in wine, which can make itself spontaneously (if poorly) when grapes are left in a vessel to rot, there is a significant human element which begins with the decision to even plant grapes that wouldn't exist naturally. Site selection, terraforming, varietal, rootstock, vine training, selective breeding, winter groundcover, tilling, weed management, pest management, fungal management, pruning and canopy management, green harvesting, physical protections (ex. bird or hail netting), harvest timing, harvesting, inoculations, temperature control… Even terroir wines are the sum of thousands of human decisions over time, lessons learned and passed down from generation to generation over centuries, as far back as the first fruit wines dating to China, 8000 BC.

In a 2021 Youtube video, Master of Wine Konstantin Baum outlines two definitions for terroir: naturalist and culturalist. The naturalist approach defines terroir "only as the natural environment of any viticultural site… the topography, the soil, the climate, the landscape, and the biodiversity including microbes in the soil make up the terroir." Konstantin feels that this definition is "misleading in its mythic simplicity…[and] has created quite a lot of confusion and resentment around the term terroir, because it is leaving out one of the key factors in the expression of a vineyard: the human influence."

The beginning and end of terroir, according to some.

This is probably why I take issue with sake podcaster, translator and writer Jim Rion's reductionist view. He asserts that when "identifying terroir, [whether] variation [is] consistent and predictable, as in 'wine from this region has a tendency to express this flavor and that's sort of been shown through centuries' — you have to do that same thing for rice." But that's a false comparison, wine to rice — the correct comparison should be wine from this vigneron versus sake from this producer. Grapes from the same terroir can produce wildly different wines in different hands.

From Moroz, S. (2024): Terroir associations across environmental and human dimensions. Low rez cause I didnt want to pay for the full version.

Which leads to Konstantin's culturalist definition of terroir, which "includes the previously mentioned soil, the exposition of the vineyard, and all the nature around it, but it also includes the human influence. This includes viticulture but also the practices in the winery. Often those practices have developed over time, and there are different approaches to viticulture and winemaking in different regions or even different villages." He points out that "the natural and cultural impact cannot be separated, because no one could really say what the expression of a site like Clos Vougeot, for example, would be if naturally occurring vines grew unmanaged up a tree."

In describing rice agriculture, Jim points out the differences between the two crops but unintentionally describes shared characteristics.

[In Japan] we have tiny, tiny little fields scattered everywhere, and every one has to be completely flat. Growing rice changes the soil. You cannot use rice fields for any other grain — Things like crop rotation don't play into it — you're changing the soil. There's evidence that rice domesticates soil, it changes the soil itself. So over time the soil that you're growing in, the soil that you're growing in adapts to the rice and the rice adapts to the soil, and every single tiny little rice field is different. They just are.

Yes, that's all true for grapes as well, and humans have been terraforming for vines for thousands of years just as they have for rice.

The INAO, the French Institut National de l'Origine et de la Qualité, updated its definition of terroir in the late 2010's:

A terroir is place where a human community has built a collective know-how related to production; the terroir is based on a system of interactions between the physical and biological environment and a set of human factors; the originality and typicity of the products arises from these factors.

I like that, but I also resonate with a more romantic interpretation.

In the French tradition, terroir cannot be reduced to the signature taste stemming from the soil. It is also the human know-how that preserves these material characteristics. In this sense, terroir is embodied and encompasses bodily dispositions. "Le vin a du corps" — it is made, preserved, and exalted by a winemaker who performs the magic of the terroir. In Mondovino, Hubert de Montille concludes that wine is "90% perspiration [sweat], 10% inspiration."

Trubek, A.B., Guy, K.M., & Bowen, S. (2010). Terroir: A French Conversation with a Transnational Future

In Wine and Philosophy, wine critic Matt Kramer (2007) refines his phenomenological definition of terroir as "somewhere-ness." This poetic definition captures the persistent ambiguity of wine's universal claim for translating the local. Thus what Trubek (2008) aptly terms "a taste of place" reflects more than a marketing strategy or a territorial possession. It is a mode of being in the world, which can provoke "a feeling that I can only describe as akin to homesickness, whether or not it is for a home that may only exist in your imagination" (Grahm 2006).

For reasons unknown to anyone, scientists and vigneron among them, only Clos Vougeot can produce the flavors and texture of Clos Vougeot. But in the wrong hands, these precious grapes are just juice. Clos Vougeot can only reveal its distinctiveness through a careful combination of natural forces, vineyard management, and winemaking. The trouble with sake is, hardly anyone approaches their brewing with this mindset.

MASL

Let's turn to coffee for a moment. The terroir concept is increasingly applied to third wave coffee, again, because it's an awfully useful way to communicate the differences between coffees. Coffee is more complicated than wine and there are more procedural steps — techniques, human intervention — that have huge effects on the final flavor profile. Irrespective of varietal and place, the fermentation technique, added ingredients (or lack thereof), duration and type of processing, duration and type of aging, extent and type of roasting, aging, size and type of grinding, method of brewing, the human touch in brewing, serveware, mood and setting, music while drinking... My point is, terroir is being mapped to coffee as well, and it's controversial there, too. Our hometown publication and one of coffee's most influential, Sprudge, describes the famed sites of Benjamin Paz, where "the rainforest and proximity to water create a unique microclimate, where the Gesha variety thrives amidst these high elevations on the farm. Benjamin then processes this coffee using an anaerobic washed process, preserving the floral flavors and silky textures of the Gesha variety grown in the Santa Bárbara terroir."

A thorough review of the literature in the journal Foods by Williams, Barkla, Rose, and Liu (2022) asks: "Does Coffee Have Terroir and How Should It Be Assessed?" First, they propose a definition of coffee terroir — see above — (which is juxtaposed to wine inaccurately: harvesting, processing, and storage can be considered facets of French terroir), and over some 10 pages and 141 citations outline an argument for its influence on the final product. I think the trouble here is, their proposed definition of terroir is so broad that the reader is left thinking, "of course all of these factors together influence the final product, that's the point, but is it meaninglessly broad to call the sum total of originating factors terroir when the original notion of terroir evolved from individual plots of grapes farmed and vinified similarly?" This vagueness is destined to evoke armchair wisdom to the contrary.

Terroir in coffee is largely a myth. We often try to draw parallels between coffee and wine... but terroir is imposed in wine by legal regional restrictions on cultivar and process. We don't have that in coffee... what you may taste as 'terroir' in coffee is in fact often poor infrastructure, lack of training, lack of resources. It's a missed opportunity rather than inherent flavor.

Reddit / r/coffee

A quick conversation with my good friend and co-owner of Coffee Ma, Kris, helped me understand why this misses the point on process-driven regional typicity. He described how different processing styles can be typical to different locales, linked to that locale. A natural fermentation process in which the coffee berries are left to ferment in ambient conditions before the fruit pulp is removed will look very different in dry, high elevation climates vs. moist, humid subtropical climates. Certain processes are difficult if not impossible to pull off in one area versus another, and the specialization that arises becomes embodied knowledge as much as vine training methods in France. Down the line, it's up to the roaster and brewer to faithfully represent the flavors born in each stage, otherwise the terroir is lost — no amount of finesse in the farm will overcome a roaster charring the beans to carbon.

AYV: Align Your Vectors

Mr. Roussille with his wine

There's one opinion I might value above all others on this subject: that of Gautier Roussille, who has been making wine in Burgundy his whole life and currently runs Domaine Guillemot-Michel with his wife Sophie in Quintaine, Maconnais. Besides being a cut-from-the-cloth French vigneron (grows the grapes and makes the wine) in the cradle of terroir, he literally wrote the book on sake brewing, spending nearly 6 years learning from Sohomare Shuzo in Tochigi. These are some major cross-specialization chops, and from a production standpoint perhaps unmatched anywhere in the world.

In a podcast interview with Sake on Air, Gautier anticipates the question. "I don't depend on the sake world to make a living, so I am free to speak my mind." He points out that just as in turn-of-the-century wine, sake technique democratized itself to the detriment of individuality. "The emulation of terroir is something from the 90's… people trying to make Bordeaux or Champagne in any part of the world, and sake was not exempt from that." Remarking on the stratospheric rise of 35% Hyogo Yamadanishiki competition daiginjo (aka YK35):

If everyone is making something considered "the best sake" then you lose terroir. Yamadanishiki [rice] from Hyogo is great and I wish for every sake maker to try their hand at it at some point, but… there is interesting [rice] anywhere in Japan. Only then can you make a sake that talks of the place: where the rice is grown and the technique of the region.

But it's not as simple as using the local rice. Any brewer would agree, human technique, technology and microbes are more important than the rice itself in determining final style. "If you take two kinds of rice you can make two kinds of sake if you respect the rice. If you use certain techniques however, it completely transforms." Terroir is as much about making decisions that respect the distinctiveness of the raw material as it is about the material itself. "We have the same thing in the wine industry where you can make the same wine with any kind of grapes. Year in, year out, whatever the conditions of the vintage — they need to make the same product."

The question is not, does terroir exist — but what can you do to reveal it?

Assessing human intervention in terroir is a difficult and nuanced undertaking, there is no objective truth and trends factor greatly in how these interventions are viewed over time. Why is some human intervention terroir-friendly, while some is anti-terroir, and who decides?

Aging in flavorful new oak barrels is considered anti-terroir in most of the world because its intense flavors can overshadow the nuance of a base wine… but not in Rioja. For political reasons, American oak gained a foothold in Rioja and became standard for classic Rioja wines 100+ years ago. It is entrenched to such an extent that oaky coconut-dill-chocolate notes overlaid on Tempranillo and Grenache's ripe red fruit combined with deep pigmentation are the key, teachable tells for Rioja. But on the same token, if an Oregon winemaker uses new American oak barrels for their pinot it's seen as a thoughtless sledgehammer, negating any trace essences of terroir cultivated in the vineyard. What?

Following this thread, it's easy to see how the sake terroir conversation devolves into subjective nuance, particularly in a changing world and changing climate. Temperature control, microbial inoculations, koji method, rice polishing… what supports terroir, what opposes it, and who decides?

Gautier suggests a fittingly straightforward analogy.

Terroir is a vector. Variety or cepage of rice is a vector. Transformation techniques are a vector. You can make it so that all of the vectors cancel themselves, or you can help them go in the same direction. And from that you can make something very different each year and each batch, or you can make the same thing every time.

Konstantin Baum puts it another way: "Winemaking can mask terroir, so a great winemaker shows respect to the natural influences that have shaped the smell and the taste of the grapes and tries to conserve them in the wine. Terroir cannot be created in the winery, but it can easily be destroyed in the winery."

For hundreds of years toji (perhaps, Japanese material philosophy in general) have prized consistency over variability while France has done the opposite, accepting variability among sites and vintages. So with rice and sake today it's very new, very much a learn-as-you-go thing. If terroir has to do with aligning vectors, then each brewery needs to align its farming, production, and finishing so that the final sake is a distinctive and honest representation of place, something that could only be made in this kura, and often at the expense of trend-chasing, or even deliciousness.

I'm still trying to make out the notion of terroir. I'm not sure about it in Japan. Some people talk about terroir but polish the rice to the utmost extent and remove any terroir. The pure starch element of the rice can't be fermented until it has been converted to fermentable sugars. I don't see an element of terroir in this. [But,] there is no such thing as two identical layouts in Japanese sake breweries, and when you add the macrobiology of the place, the bacteria in the preparation, the wild bacteria — a lot of this is terroir. The microbiological ambience of the brewery has a big impact.

Richard Geoffroy, IWA sake

Sake is Rice Wine

The Cube Rule of Food

Nearly all of my peers groan in palpable agony when they hear this. But to me, calling sake "rice wine" is a convenient analogy that communicates a myriad of ideas with one word. I might feel this way because I'm comfortable with both worlds — wine and sake — and I believe that both sides stand to benefit more from cross-pollination than either would benefit from separation (or pedantry). Sake breweries would make more unique and exciting sake if they took a page from the terroir book in search of local rice, committed to not adjusting water, explored their local microbiome, and played around with techniques that require less temperature control, valuing individuality over uniformity. On the other hand, the world of wine would benefit from a humbling exercise in the manufacturing and sensory challenges of sake; wine drinkers who put their egos aside will see their horizons broadened and may contribute to the recovery of a struggling industry. And no one honestly thinks that sake is made from juiced rice.

Gautier, as always, puts it well.

There are people who want to protect sake from wine influence, people who want to transform sake via wine influence… we don't want sake to lose its soul. But maybe [Japanese sake brewers] needed wine to realize they lose a little something by losing their connection to rice — in some cases, not always. But… if you don't grow your rice, you're losing an important connection there. If you buy rice through a big co-op, you're not obliged to care about [its nuances].

With every sake served in a wine glass, every cheeky use of "vintage," "cepage," and "domaine," every disjointedly high-acid brew marketed as good for wine drinkers, a resistance intensifies among the traditionalist set. A handful of new sake projects founded in tandem with French winemakers (IWA, Heavensake) have made matters worse by injecting a nasty western savior narrative into the mix, implying that they've "brought assemblage to Japan", or were the first to "find terroir" in sake. Unaided, kuramoto under the influence of Francophilia have in other cases rebranded their breweries as domaines: a French term for wineries that manage all steps from grape to vine in house.

Gross

From Senkin Shuzo's website:

Domaine. This concept means trusting the unique elements of the soil and not against its nature. In the Sakura City in Tochigi prefecture, "climate," "water," "rice," and "kura," all these environmental factors can only be found here give irreplaceable uniqueness to Senkin.

Water is the life of sake. We are particular about the water that we are using in sake making, and we use the same water to cultivate the rice. The original ingredients, "Kamenoo," "Yamadanishiki," and "Omachi" sake brewing rice varietals, are grown with the same underground water vein of the brewery. They are the selected cepage or varieties of Domaine Sakura.

Mr. Senkin, Kazuki Usui, just doing his thang.

Ok — It is a bit cringey.

Sake Deep Dive, a podcast hosted by specialized sake translator and writer Jim Rion and professional kurabito Andrew Russell, has two agonizing episodes on terroir (love the podcast, hate these episodes) that summarize the contrarian opinion well, if you can manage to get through two hours of echo chamber buzzing. Jim says:

I have a sneaking suspicion that it's just a kind of pandering… It has to do with this perceived cultural superiority of France, people want to use French words to talk about sake, they want to treat sake like wine because France is respected and I guess Japan isn't… but it's just wrong in so many ways because sake is not wine. It just isn't. So why are you trying to sell sake like wine? Sell sake as sake, sell it as itself.

As far as we're concerned there is no deterministic terroir involved in sake. Sake is a process-driven drink in which the process is built around adjusting and addressing natural influences. I like to think of sake brewing as about as natural as bonsai. It's a tree, it's a natural thing, it grows in the soil, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly natural thing, it has been painstakingly shaped by the hand of a human being.

True, but could you ever raise two exactly identical bonsai?

And I think the point I would make is that some sake are more or less like bonsai — sake is a continuum of human intervention, with bonsai living at one end of the spectrum. I would argue that some are more like trees pruned using traditional Japanese techniques — something more akin to honing — raised, propped, and shaped carefully by human hands, but no one would ever say they asserted their will over its final form.

Terroirist sake: its final form.

Fudo in his own words: Chiyo Shuzo

Mr. Sakai, also just doing his thang.

I chose to include Chiyo Shuzo this month because I really fell in love with this Aiyama brew in July, particularly the first time I heated it for a customer… and the theme really fell into place from there, because I had preordered Ryusei last Spring based on how gangbusters awesome it was in 2025. But really when it comes to Chiyo Shuzo, across the spectrum of every release and every brand, you notice how distinctive it is. When I visited the Chiyo Shuzo bar in Osaka which serves their products exclusively, I realized: "Oh, Chiyo Shuzo tastes like Chiyo Shuzo." It was a lightbulb moment. Everything they make is linked by a certain-something astringency and leanness, no lack of umami or acidity but very clean and light, something almost Fresca-aspartamey at first, with length but not weight. Toji Tetsuya Sakai has been farming since he took over in '96, but this sake is made from rice grown elsewhere in Hyogo. It's simply too difficult to grow all of his own, and nor does he want to. Sakai-san has said in interviews he enjoys learning about older rice varieties from other regions.

But his approach to brewing and his style, his decision making — the human element — is really different. But I'll let him talk for himself — these quotations are taken from interviews on Signor Sake, Sake Today, otokonokakurega.com, and Sakai-san's personal toji blog.

My wine background may have been the motivation for me wanting to grow rice ourselves at the brewery as well as aging sake… I never liked sake with a lot of amino acids, so I wanted to brew sake with a low amino acid content. My next goal was to make unpasteurised sake that didn't spoil and my final goal was to make sake that ages well. These three goals are still the same today.

I want people to experience acidity and clarity with our sake. In the past, there were many sakes with a lot of acidity, but it needs to be a clean acidity. Just having a lot of acidity isn't enough. With that purpose in mind, it's important to make koji well. For all of our sake, we're using a so-haze approach for our koji. The acidity comes from the long working time of the koji.

I think there's a terroir of water. The difference that comes from water should be cherished. The water we use is soft. Yucho Shuzo brewery, which is close by, has surprisingly hard water, which may be because of the difference in altitude. We are in a mountain at the altitude of 125 metres. Yucho is in front of the station and is located much lower.

A terroir of rice is maybe pushing it a little. Even if the same producer grows the rice, if the fields are far apart or the soil is different, the taste of the rice will be different. I think we should be more sensitive to that difference. We should ask farmers to do their best not to mix different kinds of rice during growing or milling.

"We had our own fields around the brewery, so it occurred to me: if we brewed using only rice from these paddies, maybe we'd get something delicious." The rice itself passes Grade 2 at best, with unevenness in the grain… local cultivation has its difficulties. Even so, he holds consistently to local rice, keeping the focus on brewing sake that tastes of Kujira.

We brew Kujira brand using our own rice without blending in rice from other fields. Keep that up for ten years, twenty years, have that flavor recognized, and beyond that I hope a terroir emerges. It doesn't have to reach Bordeaux, but one tank won't do it. My sense is that terroir won't take root unless you're making a certain volume.

Fine wine has depth and you never tire of drinking it. But good sake, delicious sake, wears you out. Junmai ginjō is heavy to drink every day. I thought about how to make sake that doesn't wear you out — that isn't too good.

The first thing he worked out was to dissolve the rice thoroughly, ferment it properly, keep glucose sweetness out, and make dry sake with acidity. Sake made this way, without the sweetness of amino acids, doesn't tire you. It becomes sake that's good with a meal, too.

Sake is like music. You want not only a steady flavor but to enjoy even the unforeseen changes as a kind of rhyme, and get pleasantly drunk on it. Unless we convey how interesting it is when sake changes, its value won't rise. [On aging sake,] maturation isn't something you make. It's something that comes about. Maturation is roman.

[浪漫: roman is a borrowed word from the French connotation of romance, meaning something like the grand, slightly impractical aspiration that makes a difficult pursuit worth doing. It comes from a popular phrase, 男の浪漫 otoko-no-roman, or man's romance.]

Fudo in his own words: Fujii Shuzo

The rafters of Fujii Shuzo's historic kura, where ambient yeast species were sampled in various locations of every room for microbial analysis.

To put it simply, we had only a few cases of Ryofu to go around last year after club members got the lion's share of it — we would not let that happen again in 2026. This sake is too damn good, it has so many faces: freshly opened, ice cold, room temp, left out on a counter a few days, warmed, open (capped) in the fridge a few months, so we asked for nearly 10 cases this year. While Ryofu is technically a Summer release, like Shinomine Aiyama it's a perfect choice for the transition season — a nama you can hold on to well into Winter, like a homemade jar of tomatoes you prepared in August, when nama season is long past.

Like Shinomine, Ryusei is dry but not sharp, it has sweetness but not from sugar, the amino acids are low but the acidity is high, and this is a brewery currently undergoing a generational change from one toji to the next. Norihiro Fujii wants the next era of Fujii Shuzo to represent a return to individuality: ambient yeast, wild kimoto brewing, hiroshima (and san'in style) dry/low amino ginjo brewing, and local rice. In his Taste with the Toji episode (2023), Fujii-san talked about the process of changing their production ingredients: from 6 rice varieties to 4 (2023 was the first year they used local Takehara rice), 6 kyokai yeast types to 2, and 90% kimoto. Today in 2026, Fujii-san has met his goal for 100% kimoto and 100% house yeast (ambient yeasts, isolated from brewery surfaces).

Mid-2025, in anticipation of Ryofu's arrival, I read into Fujii-san's philosophy. Thankfully, his note blog is full of his personal thoughts, wishes and anxieties, and is an honest look at one man's quest to discover the individuality of his family's brewery. Once again, I think no sake tastes quite like Ryusei. It reminds me of Tenon — actually, I learned much later that they share toji lineage (!) — but I also believe Fujii-san is on a long path, much like Sakai-san, in pursuit of their own terroir, the identity of their own 風土. Unlike Shinomine, these comments are from the generational kuramoto (brewery manager), not the toji (Mr. Okada) who works in tandem with him.

But I'll let Fujii-san continue from here, drawing from his own note.com blog + interviews on Sake on Air, Yoko Rainbow Sake, and Takehara Kankoku.

Eli and I meeting the devastantingly Cool Santa Monica Guy Fujii-san at Sake Jump in 2025.

I didn't see any excitement in the sake industry, so I chose to move to the United States. As a kid I thought I absolutely didn't want to go back [to Takehara]; it's not a city, it's picture-book countryside. As a teenager I idolized Tokyo and Hiroshima City, and I just wanted to get out of that small town as fast as I could. But then I went to America to study, and it was only after leaving that I realized for the first time that our sake brewery was something that must not be allowed to disappear. A culture that should be properly inherited and passed on to the next generation.

What we are aiming for is sake that doesn't stop at "delicious." Sake that, underneath the taste, calls up a feeling that stays with you as a resurfaced memory. For instance: the smell of earth I knew as a child in the hills and the rice fields. The scent of steam rising white off steaming rice in the hushed air of the brewing season. Or the streetscape of the preservation district in Takehara, with its rows of old houses.

"Memory of place" is the accumulation of coexistence between nature and people. Takehara, where our kura stands, once flourished as a salt town, a place where the lives of people moving between the sea and the mountains crossed. The knowledge and ingenuity born within that satoyama culture, made by nature and human hands together; the daily practice; the prayer and the conversation. That fudo itself is, for sake, a memory of place as important as the yeast.

Last year's average fermentation was 40 days and the longest one was 52. So including kimoto, maybe 70–80 days. That's a very long fermentation. In the brewery the research institute found 83 kinds of yeast that did not share Kyokai yeast genes… Kyokai yeast is the same family, they're different but very similar. We checked the genome, our natural yeast is very far from the kyokai genome information, it's completely original. But kyokai yeast is almost like an invasive species, they have attacked the natural yeast for 80 years. So the population is very small right now… we're trying to help them repopulate the kura. (2022)

What I want to hold on to is leaving within the brewing a margin (余白 yohaku — the unmarked space on a page or a painting, the blank space a composition needs) into which humans cannot intervene. I hope we can keep listening for the voice of the kura at each moment and choosing whatever method sits best.

Why kimoto? I love to drink wine, geographic identity, but most sake is treated like an industrial good — more about the process, no terroir. I want to brew sake with nature and technique, not only technique.

Anyone in the sake industry will have heard the phrase "every year, a first-year" at least once. Lately I have come to understand what it means. Naturally we aim to make delicious sake. But in practice, every year is a run of questions asked again from the beginning. With the quality of the sake rice, the climate and the movement of the microorganisms all different, an identical fermentation is impossible. So there is nothing to do but build up, by feel, a cup that lets us say: this is what Fujii Shuzo was, this year.

The brewing we face daily is by no means completed by technique alone. Rice, water, koji, yeast — all of it is rooted in nature, and the practice of the land and the people supporting it truly dwells in a single bottle. There are people who protect the forest, people who till the fields, people who put the kura in order and raise sake in dialogue with microorganisms.

Sake, jizake (local sake) especially, is a crystal of fudo, nurtured in a particular place and handed down within the coexistence of nature and people; it expresses, as it were, the working life of a piece of land.

I have a private sense that this way of thinking connects to terroir in European wine culture, and that the essence of culture may in fact be universal somewhere.

At the end of the day, Fujii and Sakai both reach for terroir from opposite ends. Sakai builds it out of the field and argues it needs volume and time to be legible. Fujii builds it out of the kura's microbiology, the land as a vessel of memory and the distant heritage of their triumphant win in the very first 1907 nationwide Japan sake competition. The two theories barely overlap, but they're grounded in equally valid, individual interpretations of what terroir might mean for them.

—N

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