Index
Day 1: Flying
Days 2/3: Nagano Snow Shuttle
Day 4: Shiga-Kogen
Day 5: Shiga-Kogen
Day 6: Yudanaka
Day 7: Shiga-Kogen
Day 8: Shiga-Kogen
Day 9: Shiga-Kogen
Day 10: Shinkansen
Day 11: Hakushu
Day 12: Toyosu Fish Market
Japan
Got our second train experience of the trip today, with a Limited Express train to the Hakushu Distillery (Kobuchizawa Station): roughly half as far to get there, yet took nearly twice as long (80 minutes from Nagano to Tokyo on the Shinkansen, vs. 2 hours 34 minutes from Tokyo to Kobuchizawa Station today). Still, the seats are comfortable in the reserved cars, and the Hakushu Distillery is a well-polished, peaceful experience, set in the trees and mountains west/northwest of Tokyo.
The tour was in Japanese, but with an English language app for non-Japanese speakers. Felt like we lost something in the pre-recorded translation, but they still did a solid job explaining why Hakushu chose the location they did, the barley/malt/mash process, why certain methods were chosen for fermentation and others for distillation, barrel construction, and the like. They also let you in the aging warehouse, which is not insulated, so that the whisky casks can get full advantage of local environmental conditions. Hakushu Distillery's annual output (4 million liters?) may be a small fraction of what their largest competitors can do (Macallan is 16 million liters?), but the one aging warehouse they let us into-- still felt massive.
The tasting was perhaps even better done than the rest of the tour, despite the language barrier, and was a wonderful end, even if no one in the group drank all that much. The unprecedented demand for Hakushi was very much in evidence at the very end of the tasting, as it was made very clear we would only be allowed to purchase one full-sized bottle each as well as one small sample bottle each (!). Turns out many of the older vintages in evidence, both on the tour as well as in the museum, were not for sale at all at the distillery itself-- even if you could find some of them at Don Quijote stores scattered throughout Japan, albeit at far more exorbitant prices than the distillery would have charged.
Had some confusion trying to call a taxi back to the train station (thanks to the friendly distillery employees for helping us out!), which was necessary as we were departing during a bit of a gap in the distillery shuttle schedule. We had a comfortable enough ride back to Tokyo, and eventually ended the night with a bit of indecision for dinner.
Decided to throw Tabelog to the wind and randomly ended up at On-yasai for shabu shabu. Had no idea if it was going to be good, but as we descended the stairs and waited, we saw that instead of the a la carte menu, it turned out to be all you can eat. Given we hadn't really had lunch, AYCE ended up being a major win for the night.