The beginning of Saké - Public Broadcasting Atlanta

There's a lot more to saké — the legendary japanese rice wine — than most drinkers realize. The ultimate bottles embody a 2,000-yr culture this is painstaking, actual, highly labor-intensive and increasingly rare. Its introduction is a go between producing terrific artwork and raising "an unruly infant."

the mystical nature of the libation is captured in the film's opening statement: "Saké making is a living element. if you evaluate it to human beings it might be like elevating a child." and not just any child. The employees who carry Yoshida's traditional saké to life pamper it from inception. Nothing is left to possibility. There aren't any shortcuts. All advised, Yoshida's employees spend about half a yr in essentially monastic seclusion growing their world-renowned product.

whereas saké is often skilled as a warmed drink in the West, its northern eastern birthplace is cold and forlorn. Shirai's cinematic opening pictures of snow and icy surf, accompanied by using sparse normal tune, introduce a film that, like its area, is unrushed, deeply reflective and wealthy with exciting symmetries.

inside the brewery, for example, excellent clouds of welcoming steam upward push above the white rice used to make the saké—mirroring the snow and ice just past the windows. as the rice cools it's treated with a distinct mould, koji-relations, which starts off both-stage fermentation manner. Yoshida does not use the automatic methods employed with the aid of lots of its rivals. Like a great musical instrument, its product is handmade.

Making saké the typical means, says sixty eight-12 months-ancient brewmaster Teruyuki Yamamoto, requires potential and intuition. These features are handed from generation to generation — in the Yoshida enterprise's case from Yamamoto to Yasuyuki Yoshida, the company's 27-12 months-historical sixth-era heir. Shirai notes that while it's expected that the eldest son will take over the family unit brewery, it is rare for an inheritor to turn into an genuine brewmaster: "Yasuyuki is odd as a result of he wants to do it."

The film, two years in the making, is the primary in-depth examination of the Yoshida operation and a rare seem on the excessive and comparatively unknown (even inside Japan) system of ordinary saké making. Gaining access become no longer immediate or easy. After a protracted and exhaustive permissions process, the enterprise's homeowners allowed Shirai and producer Masako Tsumura to are living at the brewery. Waking every day at four:00 a.m., they have been completely immersed and embedded with the employees and ate breakfast, lunch and dinner with them. Shirai and Tsumura captured no longer handiest the subtle paintings of constructing saké, but the sacrifices made by means of Yoshida's personnel.

Being separated from spouse and children is the hardest point of the system, even though there are times of levity, together with time spent observing sumo wrestling. "They really aren't human!" an worker laughs as he and colleagues savour a televised match. There are also community sing-alongs and speak of girlfriends left behind. but this is severe and exacting work. The slightest variation in the technique, even a minor temperature shift, can negatively alter the remaining product.

The company is also below external pressure from a dwindling saké market. Consumption is down in Japan and international, in accordance with the movie, while beer, whiskey and different kinds of alcoholic drinks have made enormous inroads. This change is reflected in a single important statistic: within the early twentieth century there were 4,600 saké breweries in Japan. Now there are around 1,000.

Yasuyuki Yoshida, the younger brewmaster, comes throughout as a cheerful warrior. After spending six months making saké, he spends the different half-year touring the realm to promote the fruits of his enterprise's labor. He finds a divided market. more youthful drinkers commonly pick more recent types of saké, while traditional drinkers bitch that new models are "weak and indistinct." The latter are tremendously completely satisfied when Yoshida presents them with daiginyo, his brewery's right-of-the road traditional saké.

Shirai says he desires his movie to create "now not the desire to drink saké as much as an appreciation of the americans who make it. we're speaking a couple of demise artwork that should still be kept alive."

He continues: "We accept as true with ourselves very lucky to were smartly-positioned to discover and share this historical handmade approach, so hardly used now in our mechanized world. We hope that The birth of Saké will elicit solemn and profound introspection about our area in the historical past of constructing and consuming, and about our relationships with our personal work and with these with whom we work."