That wine can showcase terroir goes unquestioned, but for spirits, that’s usually not the case. Whiskey distilled from commodity grain, and aged in barrels made with anonymous oak, is not reflective of a particular place or moment. Nor is tequila that ends up laden with additives, or brandy that’s been doctored with boisé—to say nothing of gin whose botanicals get shipped across the globe, or that deliberately neutral ethanol vessel, vodka. The amount of processing that goes into spirits creation is much more intense than the process of making wine, and it mostly strips away any characteristics that might point to provenance.

But there’s compelling evidence that some spirits have a claim to terroir. Old-school mezcal, European eaux-de-vie, and fresh cane juice rums all highlight the nuances of their base ingredients, incorporating the vagaries of growing season, conditions, and climate that fluctuate from place to place and harvest to harvest. In their purest forms, such spirits offer unique snapshots of the intersection of agriculture, nature, and the hand of the creator, just as the best wines do.

Let’s add one more to the list: shochu. No, not soju. That's a whole different thing. A Japanese spirit originating in the 16th century on the southern island of Kyushu, shochu can be made from dozens of base ingredients. The most common are rice, barley, and sweet potato, but the list also includes, among others, sesame, shiso, green tea, wasabi, shiitake mushroom, sake lees, and kokuto, an unrefined sugar made in Japan’s Amami Islands. Unlike most other spirits, shochu undergoes a single distillation in a pot still, which preserves a wealth of delicate aromas and flavors created during the complex saccharification and fermentation processes. And, most crucially, shochu is made with a mold called koji—a microbe that pervades every level of Japanese food and drink tradition.

“There’s a seasonality and a geographic hue to the flavor profiles” of different shochus, says Christopher Pellegrini, author of The Shochu Handbook and founder of Honkaku Spirits, which imports shochus into the United States, noting that these characteristics apply to honkaku (authentic) shochu, rather than the mass-produced industrial style. Though most shochu undergoes a resting period, distillers periodically release shinshu, or fresh-from-the-still, new-make spirit. Sweet potatoes are harvested and processed in August and September, and so imo (Japanese for sweet potato) shinshu is available in late summer and early fall. “When it comes out, you get a little indicator of what’s in store,” Pellegrini adds. He compares it to wine, with each producer’s particular shinshu varying based on the quality of ingredients and the conditions of production.

Just as not every wine is a terroir wine, however, not all shochus express terroir so clearly either. Many distilleries use imported barley or rice, or sweet potatoes whose specific provenance can’t be traced. But others go all in: on Aogashima Island, population 200, the local distillery uses both wild koji and wild yeast to ferment its locally grown sweet potatoes. Other producers make similar choices, growing their own crops or giving up control of fermentation to varying degrees. When the common elements of terroir have room to express themselves, they add up to unmistakable singularity—the kind of character one could spend a lifetime exploring.

Let’s break down three of the most crucial contributors to terroir.

Agriculture

Like wine, most shochu is made seasonally, when its base ingredients are ripe, and the conditions of the location, soil, climate, and growing season all contribute to the flavor’s starting point. Take sweet potatoes. Shochu makers are allowed to use about three dozen varieties, each of which expresses a different flavor profile. But the year’s weather conditions and the growing location—from the latitude and soil type of the fields to which side of the local volcano they’re on—have a significant impact.

“If you have a sweet potato shochu that tastes like lychee, it’s an indicator of an overly rainy typhoon season—too much water in the soil stunted growth and led to a telltale lychee taste,” Pellegrini says. His colleague, Honkaku Spirits ambassador and author of The Complete Guide to Japanese Drinks, Stephen Lyman, adds that volcanic soils impart an ashy, mineral flavor to the sweet potatoes, which carries over into the shochu. “They’re eating all that minerality,” he notes.

Process

Shochu production takes a light touch compared to other spirits, all in service of flavor creation. Most distilleries are small-scale and family-owned, with generations of tradition informing each step of the process. Double, long fermentations, often open to the air, that use both koji (see below) and yeast slowly transform the base ingredients into low-level alcohol. The fermentation then passes through a pot still a single time. This is highly unusual; most pot still spirits require two distillation runs. But because fermentation with koji is so efficient and clean, the distiller doesn’t need to make cuts, discarding heads and tails. All the flavor compounds that come through the spirit run are both drinkable and desirable. 

After distillation, shochu is placed into a stainless steel tank or, traditionally, a clay pot to rest, typically for a year and up to three years. During this time, volatile gases dissipate and more assertive flavors soften. If the distillery is located near the coastline, the shochu can take on notes of salinity as sea air permeates the aging vessel.

Some distillers also barrel-age a portion of their shochu, which imparts wood flavors. And although stainless steel is neutral, Pellegrini notes that clay pots are not; shochu aged in them takes on a minerality that’s distinct from soil-derived mineral notes. Plus, since most distilleries’ pots are decades, if not centuries old, they’re home to unique microbiota that add a subtle but noticeable impact.

The Secret Sauce: Koji

Above all, shochu’s most compelling claim on terroir comes from koji, a mold in the aspergillus genus. Pellegrini calls it a magnifying glass or bullhorn for flavor. Koji is at the heart of Japan’s culinary tradition—inseparable from it, really. It goes into soy sauce, miso, sake, and many other foods and drinks, and it is the key to shochu.

Because shochu’s base ingredients are usually starchy things like sweet potato or grain, those starches need to be converted to sugar before fermentation can take place. Enter koji. Distillers propagate it in specially designed rooms, usually using rice as a substrate, but sometimes other materials like sweet potato or barley. The koji can be black, white, or yellow; each distiller has their own custom combination, with sub-strains that are “intensely regional,” according to Pellegrini.

The conditions of the koji room, which may be essentially untouched since the distillery’s founding, are crucial to the mold’s development and the aromas and flavors it imparts. Visitors are often forbidden, lest they bring in other microbes that could interfere with the process, and distillers even avoid eating biologically active foods like natto—fermented and pungent soybeans—which could infect both the koji and fermentation areas.

Once it’s been koji-fied, the rice gets combined with yeast and water for the first fermentation before the whole mixture is added to the base ingredients. So saccharification—the conversion of starches to sugars—takes place alongside fermentation, and in that process, the koji creates a wealth of unique aromas and flavors, and a remarkable depth of umami that could come from nothing else.

“Koji is doing so much heavy lifting,” Lyman says. “It's creating acidity to protect the open fermentations from corruption. It's breaking complex carbohydrates into simple sugars so the yeast can do its work. It’s creating aroma and flavor. It's doing so much as one little, tiny, invisible organism, and it is so unique to spirits traditions.”

Tasting Shochu’s Terroir

There are three international geographical indications for shochu: kuma (rice) shochu from the Kuma River basin, mugi (barley) shochu from Iki Island, and Satsuma shochu, made in Kagoshima from local sweet potatoes. Japanese fluency is required to interpret the details of most shochu labels, which also usually do not include information about provenance of ingredients. Training the palate to recognize such differences takes years, and access to a lot of shochu and shochu distillers. In other words, you’ll need to go to Japan to dig really deep. But it’s still possible to explore shochu terroir through bottles currently available in the U.S.

SWEET POTATO

Tsurushi Floating Moon ($100) and Crio Frozen Moon ($100)

This duo from an energetic young distiller, Daijiro Yagi, is made with Beni Haruka sweet potatoes that he grew and hand-harvested in the fall of 2020 on his estate, located in the eastern side of Kagoshima Bay, just south of Sakurajima, Japan’s most active volcano. Yagi processed the potatoes separately to pull out different flavors. For Tsurushi, he hung them up to dry and concentrate the sugars, while he froze those used for Crio, thereby denaturing the cell walls. Both are spicy and fruity, with Tsurushi expressing more earthiness, and Lyman notes that the spirits continue to develop in the bottle.

RICE

Jigaden ($45)

Made from rice grown just behind the distillery using methods so traditional that Lyman describes them as “not just organic, but about 125 percent non-interventional.” After distillation, the shochu is virtually untouched: filtered just to remove large solids, but otherwise cloudy and full of oils. Jigaden has just arrived stateside and is rolling out to retail. It should be available online soon.

LEMONGRASS

Mizu Lemongrass ($37)

Most of this shochu's base is locally grown rice, from Saga Prefecture where the distillery, Munemasa Shuzo, is located, so it's a strong example of terroir on that account. But it also includes five percent locally grown organic lemongrass, which adds the bright, citrus flavors you'd expect, and represents a fairly unusual style. 

GREEN TEA

Chiran Tea Chu ($60), Mizu Green Tea ($35)

A co-ferment of sweet potatoes and two kinds of fresh green tea leaves (Asatsuyu and Yabukita), grown by the tea farming cooperative in the western half of Kagoshima where the distillery is located, Chiran is, unsurprisingly, herbal and floral, with a gentle astringency. It makes a nice comparison to the barley- and rice-based Mizu, made in Arita, Saga Prefecture, with local grain varieties and Yabukita tea leaves grown nearby, in Ureshino. Take a cue from the tea itself and try drinking this style mizuwari—that is, cut with hot water.

SAKE LEES

Shigemasu ($30)

Sake lees—the rice solids left over from making sake—are quite common in Japan, but often get used for fertilizer. So sake lees shochu is pretty rare. And this example from Fukuoka is extra special: the original daiginjo sake was brewed on-site in Fukuoka from locally grown Yamada Nishiki rice, lending the spirit a double layer of terroir. It was distilled in vacuum still, which emphasizes koji and fermentation flavors, and it’s one of the best-priced shochus around—especially when you consider its background. Look for Shigemasu to appear on retail shelves in the near future.

KOKUTO

Selephant ($57)

The Amami Islands have a domestic geographical indication for their kokuto shochu, made with unrefined dark sugar and rice koji. Demand for kokuto is so high, and the islands’ arable land so small, that most of the sugarcane used to make it is imported from Okinawa or the Philippines. There aren’t currently any local kokuto shochus available in the U.S., but Selephant—made by Japan’s youngest toji (master brewer-distiller) at Nishihira Distillery—offers a good introduction to the style. You might think you’re drinking a sugarcane rum, given the grassy and fruity notes—but the umami flavors from the koji emphasize that this is proper honkaku shochu.

BARLEY

Mizu Saga Barley ($35)

Although barley shochu is a very common style—Iichiko is a widely available, high-quality brand in the U.S.—most of it uses imported grain, so it rarely expresses terroir characteristics. A notable exception is Mizu Saga Barley, which uses two varieties of Japanese two-row barley—Sachiho Golden and Kirameki Nijo—that are only grown in Saga Prefecture, where the distillery is located, along with locally farmed rice as the koji substrate. In addition, Honkaku Spirits will soon import a bottling from Oita’s Fujii Distillery that uses locally grown Toyonokaze barley. Look for it in the U.S later this year.   

Different Ways of Drinking Shochu

Shochu is Japan’s most widely consumed spirit, due in part to its food friendliness. Shochu generally has a low ABV—anywhere from 20 percent to the mid-40s, with 25 to 30 percent most common. And it’s often diluted, making it even more amenable to mealtimes.

Overall, shochu is meant to be consumed as you like it. Drinking it neat is fine, but it’s worth also trying on the rocks, with soda, or with chilled or hot water. Individual shochus will show better in different ways. On top of that, dilution ratio is highly personal, so don’t be shy about experimenting. Use any glass you feel comfortable with.

Lyman and Pellegrini have hosted many shochu dinners and settled on a serving style they say works well across the board. The shochu is served maewari—pre-diluted, several hours or even days in advance—slightly chilled, in a wine glass, which allows the full complement of aromas and flavors to express themselves without overwhelming, or being overwhelmed by, the food. And that food doesn’t have to be Japanese either. Try shochu with any meal. Like Champagne, it’s more or less a universal match.

Barrel-aged shochu that's been aged extra long is coming to the U.S. as whisky—and it's also well worth checking out.