Whisky & Food

Hokkaido's most famous dish is Jingisukan, thinly sliced lamb or mutton grilled on a domed metal grill, soy sauce and fat running down into bean sprouts and onions at the edges. It was invented to give locals a taste for mutton in the first place. Today you'll find it on nearly every corner of Susukino, Sapporo's nightlife district.

With this fatty, slightly sweet meat, a smoky Yoichi works better than a mild whisky. The peat smoke cuts through the fat, and its salty note meets the soy sauce halfway. The whisky's dark sweetness holds its own against the sweetness of the marinade.

Not far away, also born in Sapporo, there's steaming miso ramen: pork bone and chicken broth, simmered for hours, seasoned with miso paste. Butter and corn are the classic northern Japanese toppings. Here, a sip of water suits the meal better than whisky, though a milder dram afterward makes a fine way to wash the fat off the tongue.

The Akkeshi distillery sits in a town Japan knows above all for one thing: oysters. Fresh from Akkeshi Bay, raw or lightly grilled, with just a squeeze of lemon, they meet a glass of whisky that comes from that very same bog and that very same sea air.

That's no coincidence, it's by design: smoke and salt in the glass, iodine and sweetness on the oyster. Both come from the same cold coastline. Taste them together, and you're really tasting a single landscape, once in liquid form, once served on the half shell.