Ponshukan Sake Museum in Niigata

The Ponsyukan Sake Museum in Niigata is about an hour's drive from Tokyo by high-speed train. This place is home to a number of distilleries producing the famous Japanese rice vodka sake. To get to the museum, you need to get off at the Echigo Yuzawa station, which was renovated in 2010, which is very convenient for foreign tourists. They have convenient information desks, as well as numerous shops and restaurants. While waiting for the return train to Tokyo, you can try the famous drink here and even swim in the onsen, a hot spring with sake.

Short description

The Ponsyukan Sake Museum in Niigata is officially called a museum, but the building looks more like a store. The attraction is located in a two-storey building, with a shopping and tasting room on the top floor and a restaurant on the ground floor. It is said that more than a hundred types of national Japanese vodka are stored here.

In order to start the tasting, you need to get a ceramic cup at the reception and buy 5 tokens. In the Ponsyukan hall of the Ponsyukan Sake Museum in Niigata, you can find numerous dispensers with a drink, in fact, these are vending machines. After dropping the token in there, the visitor receives a 25-milliliter portion of the selected drink in the cup. The choice is not easy, because there are about 100 types of delicious and varied sake in the assortment.

Museum Features

Wherever you are in the Ponsyukan Sake Museum, the tasting room staff will be nearby, ready to help at any moment and explain the specifics of each drink. For example, a woman is likely to like sweet sake with a pink tinge. Tourists really like to receive another filled cup in exchange for a token at the Ponsyukan Sake Museum in Niigata. They say that you can reveal the taste of the drink most fully with a pinch of salt, which you need to put on your tongue before tasting a cup of sake. There are also dozens of varieties of salt here.

If you like a certain type of sake, you can purchase a whole bottle of the drink at a nearby store. The shelves here are simply bursting with many varieties, each of which can be taken with you as a souvenir. They also sell souvenirs here. If you're hungry, you should try bakudan onigiri, which means "rice ball bomb." Large and hearty, made from rice with stuffing and wrapped in a sheet of seaweed, bakudan perfectly satisfies hunger and sets off the taste of sake.

Bathing in the spring

At the end of your visit to the hospitable Ponsyukan Sake Museum in Niigata, you should definitely visit Ponsyukan Osnen to take a dip in the bathtub. A portion of sake is added to the healing water from the purest hot underground spring, which, according to experts, significantly improves blood circulation. The bath procedure is so pleasant and relaxing that the visitor risks falling asleep and missing his train. There is only one thing to worry about, the journey as a whole will bring only positive emotions.