Western drinks challenge sake

Press, 30 November 1982, Page 27

Western drinks challenge sake

By

KEITH STAFFORD,

through NZPA Takayama, Japan

The aroma of brewing curls round the wooden buildings of the sake shops in the quiet, narrow streets to the old town of Takayama, deep in the mountains. Not 100 m away, in brightly lit bars of chrome and tubular steel, wine and whisky are mounting an increasing challenge to the town’s traditional beverages. Gaudy advertising extolling the virtues of various brands of draught ale has recently 'sprouted at the nearby “nomiya” (neighbourhood restaurant bar), an outward sign of a fierce battle being waged by Japan’s huge beer breweries.

Takayama and. its old-es-tablished sake-brewing companies are suffering from the

changing habits of the Japanese drinker. The nation’s total consumption of alcoholic drink has remained stable at about seven million kilolitres over the last three years, but sake drinking has declined. Legend has it that sake was first 'drunk by the gods. But mere mortals in Japan sipped their way through 1.5 billion litres of it last year, just slightly less than they did 10 years ago. In the same decade, Japanese beer-drinking increased 64 per' cent to 4.5 billion litres, whisky-drinking 140 per cent to 340 million litres and wine-drinking a staggering 590 per cent to 55 million litres.

“This flagging consumption of sake is being caused by the westernisation of Japanese families and their changing tastes for food,”

said Benichi Ikeda, a member of the Japanese Sake Association’s secretariat. The association is so worried by the change, that it has opened a promotion centre in the fashionable Ginza district in the heart of Tokyo, armed with computers scanning the nation’s 4000 brands to help potential tipplers. “We in the sake industry are lagging behind in promotion compared with the few big beer breweries and whisky distilleries, because there are still nearly 2600 sake manufacturers in Japan,” Mr Ikeda said.

To a Westerner, sake can best be described as a light sherry, served warm in ceramic cups .from small flasks. Rolled out in colourful wooden barrels protected by swathes of rice-straw, it is a main feature at festivals and cherry-blossom viewing parties.

At the sake breweries, cooked rice carrying a yeast fungus is added to fresh rice and hot water to ferment. Unlike wine, sake does not mature with age and is best drunk young. It does not taste like a strong drink, probably because the heating gives a mellow taste and drives away throat-wrench-ing acids. Still, the alcoholic content ranges from 16-to-17 per cent and its potency creeps up on a person quickly. In Japan the man who can down six or eight flasks, each containing 180ccs, is considered a heavy drinker.

But hardy tipplers in Japan these days are moving to whisky, popularised by “mizuwari” (whisky and water) or “onzarokku” (on the rocks). Japanese whisky manufacturers, who often use Scotland’s malts for blending, are predominant, but the Scottish Highland distilleries have launched a big promotion campaign to increase their share of the Japanese market from 7.5 per cent. While whisky is cutting into the sake market, Mr Ikeda said he thought more

damage was being done by the national swing to wine.

The Japanese are becoming more Western ' every year, enjoying British and French fashions, the American national sport of baseball and Western-style furniture, and their drinking habits are following the trend. Favourite brands of wine come from France and West Germany, with local wines from the mountains north of Tokyo helping to maintain the supply. .

Californian wines are reasonably well established but surprisingly Australia, a traditional food supplier ; to Japan, has only 1 per cent of the wine market.

Meanwhile, over at the beer breweries a battle of foam is intensifying. Japanese beers are not well known outside Japan. The four main breweries — Kirin, Sapporo, Suntory, and Asahi — export a mere 1 per cent of their total production. Kirin is the largest, sup-

plying- about 60 per cent of the national market, but recently lost out because of its conservative nature. It re; tained ■ its once-popular bottled beer while its rivals launched a marketing campaign for draught beer, which last year took a quarter of the total market.

Sapporo led the way with 950 million litres of draught beer, about 55 per cent of the company’s total production last year. This compared with just 5 per cent of draught beer in Kirin’s total output. Suntory this year completed a new factory to the north of Tokyo capable of brewing 40 million litres of draught a year. Kirin has been forced to fight back by increasing draught production from 17.5 million litres last year to 62.6 million litres this year. Amid the cut-throat marketing, Japan's drinkers are smiling. There were no price increases in the beer gardens this summer.