Umeshū (Japanese Plum Wine)
I love umeshū. 梅酒は大好きだ。
Here’s the best business idea you’re ever going to hear: import Japanese plum wine. Market it for springtime day drinking and nights out year round. Girls will love it openly; boys will love it in secret.
Here’s some artwork for the advertising.
The “ume” is a sour Japanese plum that, steeped for a year in shōchū, brandy or vodka and mixed with sugar, becomes a delicious, floral, sweet, slightly sour libation. It’s a drink old blokes in Japan make in their sheds: it has a folksy, crafty sort of air. That said, some of the big whisky producers also do a premium looking bottle of umeshū.
You can get it just about everywhere in Japan. It is lovely when late spring is heating up, with ice or in a cocktail. I’ll make you an Ume Hana (plum blossom) Martini some time (I’ve just invented it in my head but it must be nice: rokku gin, maybe, or a black sugar shōchū, with a drop of plum wine and a sesame leaf?). Here’s how I imagine the scene of us drinking together:
From flippant to sincere: in Chinese and Japanese literature, the plum blossom has come to represent a wisftul, lonely emotion, though the plum is associated with the conquest of winter by spring. When I first moved to Japan in 2011, homesick, we were taken for dinner to a beautiful traditional restaurant called, appropriately enough, Ume No Hana. We had a fancy kaiseki meal sat on tatami mats in a paper-walled room. And they gave us this fine plum liqueur as we looked out on the garden. It seemed to me then refinement itself. But somehow austere and I was lonely and a long way from home.
Here is a touching poem I love by the Chinese poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), a widow during the turmoil that split the Song Dynasty between north and south. I think it captures some of the meaning of the plum and its emotional gravity in east Asian literature. I imagine her getting drunk on umeshū, itself a product of plum fragrance eeked out by time.
Year after year when it snowed,
I’d put plum blossoms in my hair and get drunk,
I’d crush the plum blossoms with ill will,
And soak myself in purest tears.
This year, out of the way, at the edge of the sea and the sky,
The hair on my temples blossoms white,
I see the evening wind is so strong,
It will be hard to find plum blossoms.
I crush the stamens,
Just to wring out a little more fragrance,
Just to prolong the time.
Here comes spring. Let’s have a glass of plum wine and put Diageo out of business.
Umeshū. I love umeshū.