出羽桜酒造Dewazakura Shuzo

In 1980 Dewazakura took its best sake and sold it as if it were cheap. The bottle was a ginjo, the painstaking, low-temperature, heavily-polished style that breweries until then made almost only to enter into competitions. Dewazakura put it out under the lowest tax grade the law offered, "unranked second-grade sake," and that was the whole trick. The low grade dropped it into a reduced tax band, which meant the brewery could sell a competition-caliber ginjo at a price an ordinary drinker would actually pay. They called it Oka, "cherry blossom," after the brand.

Up to that point most people had never tasted ginjo and many had never heard the word. It lived inside the industry, brewed for judging panels and then mostly poured away or kept for the trade. The official history is blunt about the gamble: the brewery wanted regular customers to know how good ginjo could be, so it deliberately released one for them. Oka turned into a hit on the strength of its aroma alone, and other breweries noticed. They started making unranked sake too. Within a decade the grading system that Oka had quietly exploited was so undermined that it was scrapped, in 1992. The 1980s ginjo boom traces back, by the brewery's own account and SAKETIMES', to this one decision in a town of sixty thousand people.

That town is Tendo, in the Yamagata basin, hemmed in by mountains and brutal at both ends of the year: summers past 35°C, winters that bury the streets in a meter of snow. Seijiro Nakano founded the brewery there in 1892. It is older than its most famous moment by nearly ninety years, and for most of that span it was a competent regional kura among many. What changed everything was the willingness to misuse a tax grade on purpose.

The house style still leans the way Oka pointed it: fragrant and clean rather than heavy. The sakenowa profile for 出羽桜 reads moderately aromatic and on the lighter side of rich, which is about what you would expect from a brewery that bet its future on perfume in the glass. The judging world eventually came back around. At the International Wine Challenge in London, the junmai daiginjo Ichiro was named Champion Sake in 2008, the single top award chosen from all the trophy winners across 313 entries. In 2016 the junmai Dewa no Sato did it again, making Dewazakura, by its own record, the first brewery to take Champion Sake twice. The sake they once disguised as second-grade now wins the highest grade there is.

Key facts

• Founded 1892 in Tendo City, Yamagata Prefecture, by Seijiro Nakano
• In 1980 released Oka (桜花) ginjo to the general public, marketed as "unranked second-grade sake" to fall into a lower tax band and so reach an affordable price; ginjo had previously been brewed largely for competitions, not retail
• Oka's success is credited by the brewery and by SAKETIMES as a trigger of the 1980s "ginjo boom"; the proliferation of unranked sake helped erode the grading system, which was abolished in 1992
• House style is fragrant and relatively light; the sakenowa profile for 出羽桜 reads moderately aromatic, modest on body
• IWC (International Wine Challenge) Champion Sake, the single top award selected from all trophy winners, won twice: junmai daiginjo Ichiro (一路) in 2008, from 313 SAKE-category entries, and junmai Dewa no Sato (出羽の里) in 2016; the brewery records this as the first time any kura won Champion Sake twice
• Flagship: 出羽桜 (Dewazakura), with the landmark label 桜花 (Oka)
• Note: sources do not consistently state the current president or how the Nakano family generations are counted, so neither is asserted here