Ontake distillery (御岳蒸留所) in Kagoshima Prefecture will begin online sales on August 28 of a 582-bottle, cask-strength single malt: Ontake Single Malt Kakejiku Series 2021-2026, a first-fill Oloroso solera sherry butt matured for five years and bottled undiluted at 58% ABV. Tokyo bottler Royal Mile, working under its whisky label The Plinius, says pre-launch registrations for the release have already passed 300, and a preview tasting seminar sold out ahead of the sale date.
The bottle is the first release in what The Plinius calls its Kakejiku (掛け軸) series, named for the hanging scrolls traditionally displayed in a tokonoma alcove and changed to suit the season or a guest. Rather than treating the label as packaging, the company says it wants each release to render the nature, culture, history and maker’s intent of a whisky’s birthplace the way a scroll composition would. For the debut bottle, The Plinius chose Ontake, an old name for the northern peak of Sakurajima, the active volcano across the bay from Kagoshima City; the label reads the mountain’s rising plume of smoke as an ascending dragon, a traditional symbol of rising fortune.
The whisky itself was selected by Kazunori Shizutani, a Tokyo-based independent bottler who tracked the cask for roughly five years before deciding it was ready. It is sold in four configurations — the bottle alone, a tasting-notebook set, a glass-pairing set, and a charity edition that donates part of the price to Kumamoto earthquake reconstruction — priced from ¥15,950, a level in line with the premium single-cask pricing common across Japan’s limited whisky releases. Ontake distillery itself is operated by Nishi Shuzo (西酒造), a shochu maker founded in 1845 known for its Satsuma Homare and Tenshi no Yuwaku brands. It converted part of a golf resort it had acquired in Hioki, Kagoshima into a distillery in 2019, becoming the prefecture’s third whisky producer after Mars Tsunuki and Kanosuke. Its two stills, both fitted with upward lyne arms for a lighter, fruitier spirit, feed a warehouse that the distillery says ages everything in used sherry casks.
Why it matters beyond Japan
The release is sold only through Royal Mile’s Japanese storefront, with domestic shipping charges and no stated plan to ship overseas, so it will not reach export markets before the 582 bottles sell out to registered buyers. It is, however, a marker of how quickly Kagoshima’s craft whisky scene has grown: alongside Ontake, the prefecture now has Mars Tsunuki and Kanosuke turning out single malts that have already found international distributors, giving overseas drinkers a template for what an Ontake release might look like if the distillery pursues exports once its own stock matures further.
Source: Japanese Whisky Dictionary (jpwhisky.net) (Japanese)
Leave a Reply