With a session in the outdoor onsen booked for eight, we weren't going to be drinking too much before we went, and the all-French wine list contained a half bottle of Chateau Reysson from the Haut Medoc, a Merlot that was definitely interesting.
We pottered about for the rest of the time before dinner, which came with the familiar spread of interesting little plates for starters, followed by more of the same through to the centrepiece, a shabu-shabu hot pot where the simmering liquid was soy milk rather than water or stock.
A more assiduous recorder would have captured all this on camera, but we were too busy interacting with the maid to do so before we started eating. Once we had started, and the initial array had been spoiled, there were used plates that hadn't been removed, so the photographic evidence is limited to the first course.
A little more time needed to be killed before the onsen session, and one could have been tempted to sample the Merlot, which had been opened and was quietly breathing in the annexe near the bathroom, where it wouldn't cook the way it would have done in the heated main room.
Madam came up with one possible time killer, in a suggestion that with dinner underway the network was probably experiencing less traffic than it had been, and we might be able to access it if we wandered downstairs.
We did, but we couldn't, so we headed back upstairs, where I noted a rather strange anomaly after we'd had our turn in the onsen, where the contrast between external chill and forty degree water was interesting, to say the least. We were booked in for three-quarters of an hour, but barely managed fifteen minutes, which accounts for earlier remarks.
Given the darkness outside I'd changed seats and was in between switching apps on the iPad when I suddenly noticed forty emails that hadn't been there when we went downstairs. A bit of further investigation revealed that, yes, everything seemed to work.
But only in that spot. Strange.
In any case, having scanned through the backlog it was time to pour a glass of Chateau Reysson. It turned out to be a deeply-coloured, fairly straightforward little number, fruit-driven, full-bodied and pleasantly balanced without hitting any high notes. No wow factor and I definitely wasn’t expecting any, but perfectly acceptable late night drinking, poking out into the inky blackness that had swamped the view across towards the mountains.
Tuesday, 10 December 2013 Tsugawa > Aizuwakamatsu > Koriyama > Tokyo > Yokohama