Silver
Package Design
Liquors & Wines

This Japanese dry gin represents a new venture for Asahi Shuzo, a sake brewery founded in 1830 famous for its Kubota sake brand.

Located in Niigata in western Honshu, Asahi Shuzo’s sake brewery sits at the foot of a wooded mountain overlooking lush rice paddies and a river beyond. (Rice and clean water are, of course, the two key ingredients of sake.)

The area between the mountains and human habitation where people and nature exist in symbiotic harmony is known in Japanese as "satoyama".

Inspired by this setting, Asahi Shuzo took on the challenge of making a gin that would express the unique character of the "satoyama".

Carefully crafted so that the sixteen individually distilled botanicals in the blend release their fragrances one after another, the KUBOTA GIN taste journey deftly recreates the transition from forested mountainside to cultivated fields.

Like a breeze blowing down from the hills, the complex, subtly changing taste triggers the memories of nature that we all carry inside ourselves, reconnecting us with the natural world for a nostalgic and healing experience.

The design evokes all the elements of the Japanese "satoyama" landscape: trees, water, sunlight, and a gentle breeze. An abstract approach is deliberately used to give individual consumers the freedom to conjure their own personal memories of nature.

The organic silhouette of the bottle form is inviting to the touch and protean in appearance, looking different depending on the viewing angle, lighting conditions and quantity of liquid remaining.

Due to the lens effect, the back-label graphic of trees reflected in water expands to the whole bottle, its appearance also changing as the gin level goes down.

The simple, abstract shape of the brand symbol on the neck label spurs an imaginative response, while the silver mirror surface of both symbol and cap suggests a Japanese sacred mirror that reflects the world and the myriad deities who inhabit it.

Encapsulating Japan’s age-old philosophy of animism and harmonious coexistence with nature, the design intuitively communicates KUBOTA GIN’s unique origin story and complex taste to a global audience.