A first bottle for wine lovers: Osaka exporter launches new brand

Kobayashi Junzo Shoten Co., Ltd. (founded 1890), a trading company based in Osaka, has exported sake to more than 20 countries, mainly in Europe, including Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Romania. Drawing on that experience, it has launched “SAKE INITIE”, a new brand aimed at wine lovers unfamiliar with sake. The brand name combines “inishie”, the Japanese word for “olden times”, with “Initie”, meaning “beginning”. The first release, “SAKE INITIE Neo Trad Rabbit”, went on sale at the company’s online store on 5 January 2026.

The barriers seen on the export front line

What the company has heard on the ground in Europe is this: “Sake is a strong spirit, isn’t it?”, “I can’t read the label”, “They all taste the same to me” and “You can only drink it in Japanese restaurants”. Unlike the “sake boom” talked about in Japan, the drink itself is still little known there. Customs duties and shipping costs then push shelf prices to three to five times those in Japan. At the same time, a growing number of wine lovers are looking to sake as “the next thing to enjoy”, and the company has set its sights on this group.

A 13% entry-level sake that speaks the language of wine

Neo Trad Rabbit was developed jointly with a long-established brewery, with everything from the bottle design to the aroma, flavour and price conceived from scratch. At 13% alcohol by volume, it is low for a sake. It has a fruity aroma, gentle sweetness and moderate acidity. Sake has “special designation” grades such as junmai and ginjo, but this product deliberately does not state one. Instead, it describes its taste in terms wine lovers will understand, such as “fruitiness like a Poire Williams pear (La France)” and “the scent of white flowers”. The ingredients are rice, rice koji and water. The “seimaibuai”, which shows how far the rice has been polished, has not been disclosed.

Designed backwards from local prices

The approach to pricing is particularly notable. To make the sake easy to pick up on overseas shelves, the export price was set from the outset to suit international markets. The actual local prices have not been disclosed, but designing the product with distribution costs in mind is the kind of thinking one expects from an export trading company.

For European readers, this bottle could serve as both a personal introduction to sake and a way to recommend it to wine-loving friends. Checking the aroma in a wine glass as you would with white wine, and trying it with the dishes you usually pair with white wine, is probably the way of enjoying it that best fits the brand’s aims. If you spot it in a shop, look at the tasting description written in place of a grade, and at where the price settles locally.