One prefecture, two protected names for sake, and four months between them. Minami-Aizu was registered in August 2024 and Kitakata that December. Both lie inside the same historical province, and they do not taste alike.

Minami-Aizu came first. It is a town enclosed on every side by steep mountains, with roughly nine-tenths of its area under forest. More than nine metres of snow falls there in a year and the temperature drops below minus ten. It was the first place in Fukushima to be given the designation, and the first small municipality anywhere to receive one on its own. Four breweries and eleven sakes now carry the name.

Kitakata sits at the northern end of the Aizu basin, with the Iide range to the north, the Echigo mountains to the west and Bandai to the east. The water that comes through that geology is very soft. Combined with a winter whose average temperature sits below freezing, it is said to give a sake with a rounded shape to it and a clean finish.

A single prefecture-wide designation would have been simpler and would have cost everyone less. But the valley towns and the basin do not share their water, and somebody decided that this mattered more than the convenience did. Choosing the harder arrangement is the entire argument.