I could define Yoshiharu Takeuchi as the least Japanese Japanese I have ever known, as well as the most Japanese Japanese I have ever known. He portrays all the cultural principles that are the basis of his country's culture and, at the same time, he is a firework. To dedicate himself to Rum, he left the management of the family company that supplied Toyota. For years, he was the only worker, employee and manager of Nine Leaves: from receiving orders to moving barrels in the warehouse, from fermentation to distillation, from putting them in barrels to applying labels: he did it all. No one else has ever entered his distillery to carry out a work activity. With the death of his father, he decided to take over the family business in the automotive sector, thus ending the Nine Leaves project.

OVERVIEW

HISTORY

Nine Leaves rums are produced in a micro distillery in Otsu - in the prefecture of Shiga, near Kyoto - on the shores of Lake Biwa. Yoshiharu Takeuchi opened his micro distillery in 2013, after two years of work that saw him as the protagonist of the construction of the distillery. Takeuchi San is a descendant of an important family. The symbol found on the labels of his rums in fact represents the crest of his family, composed of nine bamboo leaves, and this is where the name "nine leaves" comes from.

PRODUCTION METHOD

The water comes from a source inside an old abandoned mine. For fermentation, the founder and only collaborator of the distillery Yoshisharu Takeuchi uses a particular strain of yeasts, used very rarely. The distillation is discontinuous, in two steps, done in two stills built by the Scottish Forsyths. It is aged for two years in barrels of virgin American oak, in the particular climate of the Otsu area, hot in summer and cold in winter.