N1 · category
Shochu
- Family
- Single-distillate spirit
- Raw materials
- Rice · Cereals · Tubers
- Place of origin
- Kyushu and Okinawa, Japan
Japanese spirit distilled from cereals (barley, rice) or sweet potato fermented with their kōji, among other permitted materials. The law distinguishes single-distilled shōchū, up to 45 % vol., from continuously distilled shōchū, below 36 % vol. Okinawan awamori, made from rice with black kōji, belongs to the former. The historical heartland is the south-west of the archipelago, but the law ties shōchū to no region: it is distilled elsewhere in Japan too, as far as the Izu Islands.
The thing to remember
The kōji ferment, shared with sake, makes it a direct technical cousin of Japanese brewing.
Terroirs and geographical indications
The recognised production areas attached to this category in the Atlas.
- Shochu Regulated sales denomination, with no link to origin · Japan
Sources and validation
- Sources of the corpus
- Names and statuses: eAmbrosia, the official register of geographical indications of the European Union. Geometries: INAO, Délimitation des aires géographiques des SIQO (27/07/2026), Licence Ouverte v2.0, reprojected to WGS84.
- Corpus updated on
- 1 August 2026
- Validation
- Seed entry Corpus under construction. Each entry is checked and sourced before validation by the future scholarly board. Protection status and mode of location are carried by each entry: an area delimited by a product specification and a reference-town point do not carry the same weight.