Matsui

Matsui Shuzo is a shochu maker in Kurayoshi, Tottori, and its whisky comes with a history buyers should know. The company sells three lines: Kurayoshi, Tottori and Matsui. In 2018 the whisky writer Nomunication reported that Matsui only began distilling whisky itself in 2017, which Matsui acknowledged, and that Kurayoshi and Tottori bottles sold before then, including age-stated ones, held no whisky distilled in Japan. The Matsui single malts, launched in November 2018, are distilled at the company's own stills.

The arithmetic is the simplest check. A bottle with an age statement longer than the years since 2017 cannot have been distilled by Matsui, and the range we track includes a Tottori 27 Year Old. Matsui does not publish bottle by bottle whether its whiskies meet the Japanese whisky labelling standard, so for the Tottori and Kurayoshi lines the safest assumption is that the whisky was made elsewhere unless the label says otherwise.

Matsui Shuzo has made shochu since 1910. It obtained a whisky licence in 2015, began distilling at its Kurayoshi distillery in 2017 with three 1,000 litre pot stills, and later added larger stills of 3,000 and 5,000 litres. A second licence, for its Baba factory in Tottori, followed in July 2018.