Sipping the world’s oldest (and most expensive) sake

“It’s like holding a poem, like holding a haiku,” says Robert Yellin, his hands cupped around the small vessel, his eyes ablaze with passion. “It’s culture and history. It’s the basic elements of life: fire, water and earth.”

Yellin is talking about a cup, a sake cup, a piece of pottery moulded by an artisan’s practiced hands more than 400 years ago, and yet still very much a living thing, so beautiful and vital.

A cup is not just a cup. Certainly not to Yellin, an American expat whose love of Japanese ceramics drew him to Kyoto almost 40 years ago. Certainly not to true aficionados of sake, who understand that the vessel you drink from is as important as a wine glass, that it alters the flavour and the texture and the entire drinking experience.

Yellin is a professional collector of pottery, but in particular of “shuki”, the cups from which sake is traditionally drunk. His eponymous gallery in the backstreets of Kyoto is more like a museum than a shop, with pieces sourced from across Japan and across history, linked by their beauty and the skill in their creation.

Those cups line the walls here and spill over onto the tatami-mat floors, all shapes and sizes, some perfectly round porcelain, others rough, irregular clay, some beautifully painted, others spattered with haphazard colour, perfect in their imperfection.

Yellin watches as you peruse the gallery to see what you’re drawn to. He comments on each cup you touch, gives you its history, explains its style. “This artist,” Yellin says as I hold a particular vessel, “says he wants every sip of sake to be like a first kiss.”

This is the initial step to understanding sake, a drink that’s so cherished and important in Japan, and yet can seem so opaque and unknowable to outsiders. The vessel matters. Everything, in fact, matters.

I’ve been drinking sake for a long time, and yet, still, it’s so foreign to me. The styles of sake, the flavours, even the labels, all of which tend to be traditional calligraphy, can be indecipherable to beginners. That’s why I’ve signed up for this day-long journey with Inside Japan into the heart of Kyoto’s sake-producing world.

And I didn’t come here just to stare at cups. I came here to drink from them. So our next destination is Matsui, a 300-year-old sake brewery in central Kyoto, just across the Kamo River from the Imperial Palace.