- Name : Lento
- Type: Brown sugar shochu
- Origin : Amami Oshima
- Distiller: Amami Oshima Kaiun Shuzo
- ABV: 25%
- Price: about 1000 yen
Just as the need for malternatives brought me to shochu in general, it was when
looking for an alternative to rum that I first tried brown sugar shochu. Recently I had a hankering for my beloved Appleton Estate rum but a 20 minutes subway ride to score a bottle wouldn't fit into my schedule: following the line of thought "sugar-cane based booze will do" I thus grabbed a bottle of the ubiquitous Lento at the supermarket.
The word lento comes from classical music's terminology, which the Japanese seem to be very familiar with judging from the bicycles named allegro, fortissimo or arpeggio (to quote just a few) I see all over Tokyo.
The name of this shochu seems to refer to the sound of classical music played through the steel tanks the spirit spends three months in, an aging process the distillery calls "acoustic maturation" (my approximate translation of 音響熟成). Whether the likes of Mozart and Vivaldi exert any influence on the shochu itself is anyone's guess, though.
I'll try to enhance further aging in bottle by exposing the unaware distillate to hyperfast technical death metal, rest assured I'll keep you updated about the results.
By Japanese law, brown sugar shochu can be produced exclusively on the Amami islands, which are roughly situated between Okinawa and Kyushu in the most southern part of the Japanese archipelago.
The production process involves the use of rice koji, aka the mold which makes
things tasty (think soy sauce and miso), and low-pressure distillation. Air pressure inside the stills is lowered to the point where alcohol evaporation happens at about 44 degrees celsius, as opposed to the 78 degrees necessary in normal conditions. This technique is pretty common in shochu production, and it is deemed to give the spirit a cleaner, neater taste without undesired impurities.
Time to dive inside the bottle at last: Lento is transparent as water and leaves long, thin legs on the glass, given its relatively modest abv. The smell is sweet in a subdued way, it reminds me of slightly unripe red grapes: European grapes that is, Japanese grapes smell like they have a cloud of candy cotton hanging around them. There is also some sort of faint vegetal, herbaceous smell which pairs well with the sweetness, think rum agricole with the volume turned down dramatically.
The mouthfeel is super delicate, the flavours are very close to what the nose suggested, with a slightly bitter note added in the ending. It leaves a pleasant afterglow in the mouth, don't expect to have your tongue buried in molasses: gentle is the name of the game here.
I like this quite a bit, it will not have you screaming from the roof in rapture, but it's gonna be a reliable buddy to hang out with. Very likely to work great in cocktails.
ザ ブレイクダウン (the breakdown)
this is a bottle you can find in almost any supermarket and its cheap price makes the cost/performance ratio highly satisfactory. Not super complex or sophisticated but definitely very, very pleasant.
Vote: 3 + 2 + 1 = 6
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