A Whisky Tour of Japan: The Route, the Bar and the Table

Start with the landscape, never the label. Japanese whisky is made in places chosen for their water and their weather, and a journey planned by place tastes better than one planned by brand.

The western line from Tokyo is the richest in Japan. Gotemba first, with Fuji filling the sky above the distillery and the spring water of the mountain in every cask. Then north into Yamanashi and the forest of Hakushu, where the water spends some twenty years in the granite of the Southern Alps before it reaches the stills, and the walk between the buildings is through birdsong. Over into Nagano for Mars Shinshu, at 798 metres under Kisokomagatake, its visitor bar pouring some twenty to thirty of its whiskies. And down at last to Kyoto, with Yamazaki a short train ride away.

The north is the other great line, and it belongs to Nikka. Yoichi on the coast of Hokkaido, built in 1934, still fires its pot stills with coal beside the Sea of Japan; Miyagikyo, in a river valley west of Sendai, heats its stills with steam and runs Coffey stills beside them. Two distilleries by one founder, Masataka Taketsuru, in two climates, and the whole of Nikka understood in a single journey. Two of Luxury Japan Travel's published journeys, The Cherry Blossom Tour of Hokkaido and The Summer Tour of Hokkaido, already include a whisky tasting at Yoichi.

And in the far south, for the traveller who has done the rest, Kanosuke in Kagoshima, whose tasting room looks out over the East China Sea.

Luxury Japan Travel's rule is three distilleries in two weeks, rarely more. A fourth turns a journey into a schedule. Three leaves room for the onsen, the garden and the afternoon with nothing in it, which is when the whisky of the morning finally makes sense.

The days themselves have a shape Luxury Japan Travel has learned to trust. Morning belongs to the distillery, when the stills are working, the warehouses are cool and the palate is fresh. At Gotemba that means Fuji clear above the buildings before the cloud gathers round its shoulders, the tour, and a first glass taken with the mountain still in the window.

Then the car, and the road on into the hills. Lunch is light and late. The afternoon goes to something with no whisky in it at all: a walk in the forest, a garden, or the outdoor bath of a ryokan, steam rising off the water into cold air, which does more to settle a morning of tasting than anything else in Japan.

By evening the whisky returns in another form, a highball beside the grill or a single malt after dinner in a quiet room, and the morning's glass is remembered rather than repeated. Three days like this, in three landscapes, and a traveller knows Japanese whisky better than most people who have drunk it for years.

Each distillery keeps its own clock, and a whisky journey is drawn around them. Yamazaki gives a share of its tour places by lottery, about two months before the month of the visit. Kanosuke opens its tours one to three months ahead, and its blending morning only once a month. Mars Shinshu rests its stills from about July to late August, so a summer visit finds the distillery quiet. Luxury Japan Travel reads these calendars before the route is drawn, never after, so that every morning on the journey is one the distillery is ready for.

The distillery is the morning. The bar is the evening, and in Japan the bar is where whisky is at its most beautiful.

The great whisky bars of Tokyo are small, some of them a single counter on an upper floor in Ginza. Inside it is quiet in a way few bars anywhere are quiet. The bartender works in a white jacket. A block of clear ice is turned under a knife until it is a sphere, set in a heavy glass, and the whisky poured over it in a slow thread; the stirring that follows is so long and so careful that it becomes a small ceremony. The back bar holds bottles from every distillery on the journey, and the bartender knows the story of each.

Kyoto's bars are smaller still, tucked into the lanes off the Kamo River, behind a door with no sign, in an old machiya with a counter of polished wood. Sapporo, at the end of a northern journey, has its own: the lanes of Susukino, where the whisky of Yoichi is poured late into the night within an hour of where it was made. In each city a tasting needs no tour and no booking, only a seat at the right counter and a bartender willing to talk, and choosing that counter is a large part of what Luxury Japan Travel does.

In Japan whisky comes to the table with the food, and the highball is the reason. Whisky over ice, topped with cold soda in a tall glass, light enough to sit beside grilled chicken at a yakitori counter or a plate of tempura without overwhelming either. A good highball is made with the same care as a fine cocktail: the glass chilled, the soda poured down the spoon so the bubbles last, a single stir.

With the gentler courses of a kaiseki dinner, whisky comes to the table as mizuwari, cut with cold water, so that a Yoichi or a Hakushu sits alongside the food rather than in front of it. It is one of the pleasures of a whisky journey to find that the spirit tasted neat in the warehouse in the morning has become, by evening, part of the meal.

The distilleries keep their own shops, and the bottles on their shelves are the best kind of souvenir: a whisky bought in the valley that made it. At Kanosuke a guest goes further, composing a blend at the distillery's own table and leaving with a 500 ml bottle of whisky that exists nowhere else in the world.

The bottle, opened at home months later, brings back the morning entire: the fog at Gotemba, the birds at Hakushu, the copper heat of the stills at Yamazaki.

The Japanese whisky distilleries worth the journey → (opens in a new tab)

The Yamazaki distillery tour, and the lottery behind it → (opens in a new tab)

The Custom Tour of Japan is how Luxury Japan Travel makes a whisky journey: private, on the guest's own dates, with a car and driver waiting wherever the distillery welcomes one, so that the second glass is never weighed against the road. The whisky decides where the journey goes. Japan, as always, decides how it feels.

Planned around youThe Custom Tour of JapanYour party aloneWith your own Tour DirectorFrom five nights, on the dates you chooseSee the journey