Suntory Crème de Kyoho / Murasaki (700 ml)

Suntory's liqueur division — now operating under the newly opened Osaka Spirits & Liqueurs Craft Distillery (inaugurated 2024–2025) — sits within the same house that Shinjirō Torii founded in 1899 as a wine importer before pivoting to distillation. That fruit-forward heritage resurfaces directly in Crème de Kyoho / Murasaki, a liqueur built around Kyoho, the large-berried Japanese hybrid grape (Vitis vinifera × labrusca) prized across Japan for its intensely pigmented, thick skin and concord-adjacent pulp — a variety rarely processed into spirits outside Japan. The production draws on Suntory's in-house spirits base rather than neutral grain sourced externally, consistent with the house's Tsukuriwake self-sufficiency philosophy. The result is a deep violet liqueur — Murasaki (紫) meaning purple in Japanese — whose colour derives from Kyoho's anthocyanin-dense skins rather than added colouring. No production parameters (maceration duration, sugar dosage, ABV) are officially disclosed by Suntory for this expression. What distinguishes it categorically: Kyoho's foxy, grape-candy character is not domesticated into a generic berry profile — it is the point. This is a deliberate celebration of a Japanese agricultural product with no direct European liqueur equivalent.