How Domaine Senkin’s sake went from awful to awesome under Kazuki Usui

Growing up, were you expected to carry on the family business? “My parents believed my brother and I would take over the business, which has been going for 200 years. But they never said we must do it. When I was young I thought sake was old-fashioned and wanted to go into the wine world instead.

In 1995, a man called Tasaki Shinya became the first Japanese sommelier to win the International Sommelier Association’s world’s best sommelier competition. That’s why I thought wine was cool. At the age of 20, I quit university, where I was studying commerce, to go to wine school.”

What did your parents think of you studying wine? “They didn’t object. They thought that since wine and sake had alcohol in common, I would learn to make alcoholic beverages and come back to the family firm eventually. I studied wine at a sommelier school in Tokyo, graduated and worked there for four years before returning to my family’s company in 2004.

With wine, you can taste the terroir of a place. Sake is different because we don’t have the concept of terroir. Up until that point, the only sake I knew was that made by my family. After I started studying wine, I began tasting different sakes and I realised that the sake from our family was awful. That’s when I went back home.”