せんちゃん
Nabeshima Hidden Sake (also known as Ura-Nabeshima)
We first commercialized this sake about 20 years ago.
We collected Junmai Ginjyo sake that had been "Arahashiri" (the first sake with ooze) and "Gouge" (the last sake after pressure) for about one month and commercialized them. Originally, this collection was blended with Izumi-Nishiki (a pre-Nabeshima brand) regular sake. However, a distributor in Tochigi advised us that this was a waste and that we should commercialize it, so we thought about how to market it.
Unlike regular Nabeshima products, selling it as junmai ginjo would require more time to assemble the sake, and the quality would be more mature than regular junmai ginjo, so we decided to label it as junmai ginjo, which is a ginjo-style sake. We were honestly hesitant to use the lord's name in mirrored letters on the label, but we decided to use the characters for Nabeshima in mirrored letters. The label was initially labeled "Ginjo-zukuri" on the right shoulder and "Kakushi-zukuri" on the left side of the label. This type of mirrored sake label is now common, but Tomikuchiyo Shuzo's "Nabeshima Hidden Sake" was the first to do so.
The success of Ura-Nabeshima, the Nabeshima Hidden Sake, prompted a distributor in Tokyo to ask breweries in Shimane and Yamagata to produce products with the mirrored lettering, and from there, products from other breweries began to appear one after the other.
Japanese>English