There are taps in Ehime that pour citrus juice instead of water. It sounds like a tourism gimmick, and it partly is, but the reason it works here is arithmetic. The prefecture's own count lists forty-two citrus varieties under cultivation: one satsuma mandarin, and forty-one others in the mid-to-late-season group.

They do not ripen together. The satsuma starts in September, and then the sequence runs on through beni madonna, iyokan, kanpei, setoka, beni princess, kawachi bankan. Each hands off to the next. Which means there is no month here without something worth pressing, and no need for the concentrate-and-reconstitute machinery that most juice depends on.

That is why local producers bottle by variety rather than blending. Blending would be the obvious move if the fruit were interchangeable, and it is not. One is sharp, one is heavy with perfume, one is mild enough that children will drink a glass without comment.

Lined up in order, the forty-two are a calendar. I drank three of them in a row, from three different bottles, and what I was actually doing was checking the date. A season at a time, in a glass, in the order the hills produced it.