Haneya Tokubetsu Junmai

A light, delicate, crisp and dry Tokubetsu Junmai with a lovely balance of earthen notes, minerality, and gentle orchard fruit (. It's not often that I resonate with the Japanese producer's descriptions, but I feel it's really apt to describe this sake as having "a refreshing transparency, like a gust of wind blowing through fresh greenery." What makes this sake special isn't a paragraph of descriptors or aromatic complexity, but a refreshing cleanliness and purity that can be hard to define. It floats across the palate, soft and feathery, finishing on a soaring mineral plateau. 

Haneya is the flagship brand of the brewery and uses competition junmai daiginjo as the inspiration for all of its products, including this tokubetsu junmai. They perform closely monitored water absorption in small batches, koji rice is managed carefully using small volumes in boxes and futa (small boxes),use only the middle (naka) fraction of the pressing, and source only the highest quality local rice. Because Haneya's sake brewing process is extremely time-consuming, they are unable to expand production and only produce a small number of limited edition products. They've been gaining international acclaim with multiple IWC award wins and a French Kura Master title as well.