A thin band of land between the sea and the mountains. Nada, in Kobe, is the largest sake-producing district in Japan, and it owes its existence to two accidents of geography: the cold wind that pours down off Mount Rokko in winter, and a hard local water called miyamizu, drawn from a few specific wells near the coast. Everything brewing needs, this narrow strip happened to have. Winter is the season of the new sake, and through the cold months the breweries open their gates in turn. You drink it freshly pressed, unpasteurized, still rough and young—a taste available for only a few weeks of the year, gone by spring. The brewers say the miyamizu differs from well to well, and that a trained palate can hear the difference. Much of Nada fell in the 1995 earthquake. The old wooden storehouses, some of them centuries old, came down into rubble in a single morning. And yet several were rebuilt, plank by plank, and are brewing still. Every winter, they press again. There is a stubbornness in that, quiet and annual, that is worth tasting alongside the sake.