Hori
I belatedly received a bottle of Tasake spring sake.
I bought Tasake's new light nigori sake two years in a row, but this is the first time I have had any other sake. Actually, I was curious about this sakura label last year and had planned to buy it, but since it had been available at the liquor store for a while, I put it off thinking I could buy it anytime I wanted. This year, I learned my lesson and acted early, so I was able to get them.
The taste is sweet like cotton candy, with a low acidity. It has a strong sense of rice flavor and body, with a refreshing bitterness in the aftertaste and a slight tanginess that is typical of Japanese sake.
This is one of the reasons why I have not bought much Tazake even though I know it is delicious, but there seems to be a large discrepancy between the image one gets from the label and the impression one gets from the taste. The cherry blossom label is fine because it still has a gorgeous spring-like feel, but the classical atmosphere of the regular label makes it hard to imagine this type of flavor.
I have so far passed up on Tazake because the label design is one of the criteria for buying it as well as the flavor, but I may have been wasting my time.
Japanese>English