The World’s Top Sake This Year Is a Junmai Ginjo — Sake News, week of 7 September 2026

On 8 September, at the International Wine Challenge awards dinner in London, the top prize in the world’s largest sake competition went to a junmai ginjo: Tenbi Junmai Ginjo Hotaten, made by Choshu Sake Brewery in Yamaguchi (IWC, Trophy results 2026). It beat 58 other category trophy winners, including the junmai daiginjo that most English-language sake writing treats as the summit of the category ladder. The brewhouse that made it was finished in December 2019.

The world’s best sake this year is not a daiginjo

The IWC has had a sake division since 2007, and 2026 was its twentieth edition. Judging ran from 17 to 22 May in Hiroshima, across eleven categories — the ten familiar ones plus a new Flavoured Sake class, open to drinks whose alcohol base is entirely sake but which have had fruit juice, fruit, tea or matcha added (Japan Sake Brewers Association Junior Council, February 2026). Medals and the 59 category trophies were published on 22 May. Four championship titles were held back for the London dinner in September.

Those four, as listed on the IWC’s own results page:

• Champion Sake 2026: Tenbi Junmai Ginjo Hotaten (天美 純米吟醸 蛍天), Choshu Sake Brewery Corp., Yamaguchi — which had already taken the Junmai Ginjo Trophy in May.
• Great Value Champion Sake 2026: Keiryu Ginjo (渓流 吟醸), Endo Brewery Inc., Nagano.
• Champion Sake Producer 2026: Niizawa Sake Brewery Co., Ltd, Miyagi — shortlisted alongside Raifuku, Endo and Heiwa Shuzou.
• Sake Prefecture of the Year 2026: Nagano — shortlisted alongside Ibaraki, Tochigi and Yamaguchi.

The 2026 page also carries a Sake Hall of Fame, absent from the 2025 results: Inoue Seikichi and Dewazakura for two Champion Sake wins each, Niizawa for four consecutive years as Champion Brewer.

How to read the result precisely

Here is the part worth slowing down for. Under Japan’s labeling standard for sake — National Tax Agency Notification No. 8 of 1989, last amended in 2022 — ginjo-shu means sake made from white rice with a seimaibuai (精米歩合, rice polishing ratio) of 60% or less, brewed with care, with good distinctive aroma and color. Add the word junmai if the only ingredients are rice, koji and water. And a ginjo may be called daiginjo if the polishing ratio is 50% or less and the aroma and color are particularly good (National Tax Agency, notification text).

So the distance between junmai ginjo and junmai daiginjo is a declared ceiling on how much of each rice grain was milled away, plus a sensory condition the producer applies to its own sake. Nobody outside the brewery ranks the two. They are names for production specifications, not rungs. The same standard makes the point in another way: since January 2004, junmai has had no polishing requirement at all — the old 70% floor was deleted precisely because brewers were making excellent sake outside it (NTA, summary of amendments).

At the IWC, the two are judged as separate categories, each blind, each producing one trophy; the trophy winners are then re-tasted together by the chairs. This year the chairs preferred the junmai ginjo to Raifuku Junmai Daiginjo Aiyama. That is a statement about two bottles on one afternoon, not a verdict on polishing ratios in general.

Milling harder removes protein and fat from the outer grain and makes a cleaner, more aromatic sake. It does not make a better one. It makes a different one, at a higher cost, from less rice. Treating that as a quality scale is the sake equivalent of assuming new oak equals great wine.

A solar company, a 149-year-old license and a local rice

The brewery’s story is stranger than the award. Kodama Shuzo was founded in 1871 in Kikugawa, now part of the city of Shimonoseki, and brewed there for 149 years as Nagato Kikugawa. Its sixth-generation president stopped brewing roughly fifteen years before the end, keeping the business alive by selling sake bought in from others. Meanwhile Choshu Sangyo, a solar-power equipment manufacturer in the same prefecture, was hunting for a reliable supply of clean water for its own operations — and found the brewery. It took the business over, demolished the old kura, and completed a new brewhouse on 26 December 2019. The company’s own history page calls the result a challenge taken on by outsiders: a different industry, and a toji from another prefecture (Choshu Sake Brewery, company history).

The rice is local too. Hotaten is brewed from Saito no Shizuku (西都の雫), Yamaguchi’s own sake rice, bred at the prefectural agriculture and forestry research center using Kokuryomiyako — a variety widely grown across western Japan in the Meiji era — as the mother line. It has been grown in Toyota-cho, within Shimonoseki, since 2003, by a growers’ group formed in 2007; the 2025 crop covered about 38 hectares (Yamaguchi Prefecture, 21 October 2025). Not Yamada Nishiki, in other words, and grown in the same city as the brewery that used it.

Hotaten itself is seasonal: the brewery releases it from late April each year, timed to firefly season, and says it is currently sold out (Choshu Sake Brewery, 10 September 2026).

What this changes if you buy sake in New York or London

Over the next few months you will see IWC 2026 stickers on shelves, and the sticker is the least interesting thing on the bottle. The useful reading is the one this result rewards: category, producer, rice. A junmai ginjo made from its own prefecture’s rice just beat the field.

The Great Value title is arguably the more practical one, because its criteria are published and concrete: the sake must retail in Japan at ¥1,500 or less excluding tax per 720 ml equivalent, and the producer must make at least 100,000 bottles a year. It is an award designed for sake you can actually find and afford, and this year it went to Endo Brewery’s Keiryu Ginjo. Worth knowing the name of.

Also this week

GI Yamagata turns ten, and the tax office is throwing the party. The Sendai Regional Taxation Bureau will hold a tenth-anniversary event for GI Yamagata (sake) on 16 October at Hotel Metropolitan Yamagata: free entry, around 400 places, applications open until 25 September, with a keynote from the Yamagata Sake Brewers Association’s special adviser and a tasting afterwards. GI Yamagata was designated on 16 December 2016 and was the first sake geographical indication covering an entire prefecture. In Japan a GI is granted by the Commissioner of the National Tax Agency and certifies two things at once: that the sake really comes from the stated place, and that it was made to a written production standard for that place. (Event announcement, 8 September 2026; NTA register of designated GIs)

Yoshinogawa, founded 1548, has discontinued its own flagship. The Nagaoka brewery announced a full rebrand on 11 September: Gokujo Yoshinogawa, its long-standing lead product, is being retired, and the range is being rebuilt around two everyday lines, Seiryubi and Keiryubi. The house style has been renamed bimi tanrei — an evolution of Niigata’s famous tanrei dryness towards something rounder and more food-friendly. The detail that matters most is unglamorous: refrigerated bottle storage capacity has gone from about 50,000 bottles to a maximum of 300,000. New products left the brewery on 11 September and reach shops from around the 15th. (Yoshinogawa Co., Ltd., 11 September 2026)

Nagano’s brewers judged their sake against dinner. On 8 September the Nagano Prefecture Sake Brewers Association published the results of its third competition scoring Shinshu sake specifically against Nagano regional dishes — a pairing contest rather than a blind aroma contest. First place, the Best Couple award, went to Kazakoshi Seiran Junmai Ginjo (風越青嵐) from Nakazen Shuzoten in Kiso, its second win in a row. The top three will be honoured at YOMOYAMA Nagano on 24 September. The same week, Nagano was named IWC Sake Prefecture of the Year. (Nagano Prefecture Sake Brewers Association, 8 September 2026)

The koji mold’s signature compound jams bacterial conversation. A paper published on 7 September in the International Journal of Food Microbiology reports that kojic acid — chiefly a fermentation metabolite of Aspergillus oryzae, the mold behind koji — interferes with quorum sensing, the chemical signalling bacteria use to coordinate an attack. At a quarter of its minimum inhibitory concentration it suppressed the signal molecule 3-oxo-C6-HSL in Pectobacterium carotovorum, downregulated the genes expI and expR, cut extracellular polysaccharide production by 41.54%, and inhibited biofilm formation by up to 36.78% in vitro. This says nothing about how sake tastes or what it does to you; the subject is tomato soft rot. It is still a nice reminder that the organism at the center of sake brewing is a working chemist. (Zhang et al., 7 September 2026)

---

Frequently asked questions

Is a junmai ginjo a lower grade than a junmai daiginjo?

No. They are different production specifications. Junmai ginjo requires a polishing ratio of 60% or less; junmai daiginjo requires 50% or less. Both are self-declared against a government standard, and neither is assessed or ranked by an outside body before it goes on the label. Milling further costs more and yields less sake per tonne of rice, which is why daiginjo is usually more expensive — but price and preference are separate questions, as this year’s IWC result demonstrates.

What exactly did Tenbi win?

Two things, months apart. In May it won the Junmai Ginjo Trophy, one of 59 category trophies awarded after blind judging in Hiroshima. In September, the IWC chairs re-tasted the trophy winners together and named it Champion Sake 2026 — the single highest award in the sake division.

What is Saito no Shizuku, and does it matter?

It is a sake rice variety bred by Yamaguchi Prefecture for Yamaguchi’s brewers, descended on the mother’s side from Kokuryomiyako, a Meiji-era variety. Whether a named rice changes the glass in a way you can reliably identify is genuinely contested. What is not contested is the economics: a prefecture that breeds and grows its own brewing rice keeps more of the value chain at home, and does not compete with everyone else for the same Hyogo Yamada Nishiki.

What does a GI like “Yamagata” actually guarantee?

Two things: verified origin, and compliance with a written production standard specific to that place — covering matters such as permitted ingredients, where the water and rice come from, and where the sake was made and bottled. It is closer in spirit to a European appellation than to a quality medal. It tells you the rules the sake was made under; it does not tell you whether you will like it.

---

Sources

• International Wine Challenge. Trophy results 2026 (Sake Awards, Sake Hall of Fame, Sake Trophy 2026 results). Results page
• Choshu Sake Brewery Corp. Selected as Champion Sake at the International Wine Challenge 2026, 10 September 2026. Announcement, Japanese
• Choshu Sake Brewery Corp. History of the brewery (Kodama Shuzo, founded 1871; new brewhouse completed 26 December 2019). Company history, Japanese
• Japan Sake Brewers Association Junior Council (Sake Samurai), official coordinator of the IWC SAKE division. Invitation to enter the IWC 2026 SAKE division, February 2026 (judging dates, eleven categories, Flavoured Sake rules, Great Value criteria, awards dinner 8 September). Entry document, Japanese
• National Tax Agency. Standard for labeling of production method and quality of seishu, NTA Notification No. 8 of 22 November 1989, as amended to 2022. Notification text, Japanese
• National Tax Agency. Outline of the labeling standard for seishu (2003 amendment deleting the 70% polishing requirement for junmai, in force 1 January 2004). Summary, Japanese
• National Tax Agency. List of geographical indications for alcoholic beverages (GI Yamagata, sake, designated 16 December 2016). Register, Japanese
• Sendai Regional Taxation Bureau (announcement issued by One Page Inc. on the bureau’s behalf). GI Yamagata (sake) 10th anniversary event, 8 September 2026. Press release, Japanese
• Yoshinogawa Co., Ltd. “Changing in order not to change”: Yoshinogawa, founded 1548, substantially renews its brand in September 2026, 11 September 2026. Press release, Japanese
• Nagano Prefecture Sake Brewers Association. Results of the 3rd competition for Shinshu sake matched with Nagano local dishes, 8 September 2026. Results, Japanese
• Yamaguchi Prefecture. Good sake rice again this year despite the heat, 21 October 2025 (Saito no Shizuku: breeding, Kokuryomiyako parentage, cultivation in Toyota-cho since 2003, about 38 ha). Press release, Japanese
• Zhang X, Huang W, Dhanasekaran S, et al. Kojic acid attenuates tomato soft rot caused by Pectobacterium carotovorum subsp. carotovorum through quorum quenching. International Journal of Food Microbiology, 7 September 2026, 462:112042. PubMed 42727430 · DOI: 10.1016/j.ijfoodmicro.2026.112042

---

Written by Dr. Sake. We take sake apart — the chemistry, the history, the label — and put it back together in plain English. For weekly diagrams, label breakdowns and brewery notes, follow @thesakeanatomy on Instagram.