{"id":5454,"date":"2009-04-21T08:59:20","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T12:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5454"},"modified":"2009-04-21T08:59:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T12:59:20","slug":"japs-beat-scots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5454","title":{"rendered":"It's Suntory Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a> does not surprise me:<\/p>\n

The Highlands of Scotland, though, lie thousands of miles to the west: the home of the best single malt whisky in the world is Yoichi, until last year a little known town on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido. Its rise to the pinnacle of the centuries-old tradition of turning barley into \"the water of life\" was enough to make any proud Scotsman weep into his tumbler of Glenfiddich.<\/p>\n

Not only did Nikka's Yoichi 1987 vintage beat dozens of other labels to claim the single malt title at last year's world whisky awards - in Glasgow of all places - its rival distiller, Suntory, won the best blended whisky award with its 30-year-old Hibiki.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I enjoyed quite a bit of Japanese single-malt when we were there a few years ago<\/a>. It was easily equal to any of the Scotches I've had - and I was careful to have plenty of each, for comparison<\/em> purposes, knowing I'd write this post, three years later. <\/p>\n

I remember spending a lot of time searching Japanese stores for a bottle of a specific Yamazaki that I had at one hotel bar. Since we couldn't speak Japanese, we couldn't ask shopkeepers for it. So I was trying to find it based on how I remembered the label - oh, it's got some big characters here, and it's off-white and there's some smaller text down the left side, etc.. Of course I never found it. We did bring back a couple of bottles of other Suntorys that I grabbed at the duty-free shop on our way home, but they disappeared (into my liver) quickly. I've never seen any of it in the States - at least not in NC. (oh look, this might be it, right here on the NC ABC special order list<\/a>... seems unlikely, but i'll try it!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guardian does not surprise me: The Highlands of Scotland, though, lie thousands of miles to the west: the home of the best single malt whisky in the world is Yoichi, until last year a little known town on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido. Its rise to the pinnacle of the centuries-old tradition of turning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}