Sake Enters Western Wine Lists Non-Asian restaurants are discovering a new friend for food By Nick Fauchald for Wine Spectator

Not long ago, diners who knew wine well enough to navigate a vertical of Burgundies were oblivious to sake, associating the rice wine with the hot, pungent beverage used to wash down vegetable tempura or a California roll at the neighborhood sushi joint.

But now, thanks to the influx of high-end Asian restaurants in the nation’s dining capitals and a few daring sommeliers, high quality sake is sidling up to wine as a versatile match for non-Asian cuisine.

In New York, restaurants such as Bouley, Chanterelle, Le Bernardin, March, Per Se, Tocqueville and WD-50 boast a selection of premium sakes and a knowledgeable wine staff to pair the sakes with their customers’ meals. In Chicago, sake is frequently matched with tasting menus at Charlie Trotter’s, Moto and Tru. On the West Coast, great sake is still most often found at the best Asian restaurants, but San Francisco’s Rubicon and Yountville, Calif.’s French Laundry have a few bottles on their wine lists.

Roger Dagorn, sommelier at Chanterelle, is a pioneer in pairing Western cuisine with sake, having matched it to his restaurant’s elegant French cuisine for almost a decade. “People are still hesitant to try sake because they’ve been burned by all the mediocre mass- produced sakes that are on the market,” he says. “Most people have never been able to try premium sake, and so they have no idea what it is or what it tastes like.”

What does premium sake taste like? Although the sake-making process has more in common with beer brewing than it does winemaking-i.e., a grain is fermented with water-the finished product often bears the characteristics of a delicate white wine, albeit one higher levels of alcohol (sake usually weighs in at around 14 percent to 16 percent alcohol, a notch above most wines and significantly higher than beer). The most common comparison is to Riesling. Like Riesling’s, sake’s flavor profile can vary from dry and robust to sweet and fruity. And as with Riesling and other whites, sake is best served slightly chilled.

Because sake tends to be lighter, more delicate and less acidic than wine, its ideal companions are lighter foods with lower acidity, especially fish and shellfish. Sake can easily be over-whelmed by heavier dishes.

Dargon frequently pairs sake with lobster preparations. Larry Stone, wine director at Rubicon, thinks sake is the perfect match for oysters, even better than Champagne, a common accompaniment to the bivalve. “Oysters really don’t work well with Champagne,” Stone says. “Sake is clean…and emphasizes the freshness and salinity of the oyster.”

Like many sommeliers and wine directors, Joseph Scalice of March went to Japan to discover sake’s potential. “When I came back from Japan, I sought out all the good sake I could find and fell in love

Bacchus Importers, Ltd. - 1817 Portal Street - Baltimore, Maryland 21224 - Phone (410) 633-0400 - Toll Free: (800) 525-9699 with it,” he says. “Ten years ago, I decided-with my wine list being unique with lots of small- production wines already-why not do something interesting with sake?” Scalice now maintains a rotating list of about 10 sakes, pairing them with everything from raw fish dishes to chicken and salmon.

“I look to pair either a sake that is going to be dynamic with the food and bring the dish to a new level or a sake that just underlines the flavors of the dish,” Scalice says. At March, he pairs Wakatake Daiginjo Onikoroshi-a mild, silky, food- friendly sake worth noting-with fricassee of seasonal vegetables.

Paul Roberts, wine director at the French Laundryand Per Se, usually sends out sake near the beginning of his restaurants’ marathon meals. “For me, sake serves a variety of purposes,” Roberts says. “First and foremost, it works really well with food. I often use it with canapés and light fish courses. It’s also great with caviar. And it’s a nice counterpoint and contrast to wine. …It’s very precise in that the flavors are very pure.”

One glass of sake can combine the best characteristics of several types of white wine, Robert says. “You can usually find flowery and earth flavors in the same beverage, which you don’t always find in wine. I can get a minerality up front, an earthiness on the midpalate and a high, flowery perfume.”

Sommeliers don’t limit them selves to seafood. “People are just waking up to sake’s food-pairing possibilities,” says John Gauntner, an American sake expert living in Japan and author of several books on sake. “When matched correctly, sake can work with all sorts of food.”

A Robust sake with more alcoholic heft (the Zinfandels of sake can hit 20 percent alcohol) can handle more substantial dishes. At a recent sake dinner at Chanterelle, Dagorn paired Ichinokura Taru Junmai, which is aged in cedar barrels and has a smooth, slightly woody taste, with a cocotte of chicken and wild mushrooms. Rubicon’s Stone pairs the same sake with veal loin, and smoked pork belly with Narutotai Genshu, a big, earthy sake with citrus notes.

But pairing sake with meat courses isn’t always an easy sell. “If I tell a customer, ‘With that smoked pork leg forget the beautiful Rhone you were thinking of and have this sake instead,’ it’s a much harder jump for the Westerner,” Stone says.

To encourage their wine-loving customers to try something new, sommeliers often treat their sakes as another category of wine, listing them on the wine menu and serving them in white wine glasses or Sherry copitas instead of traditional sake shooters or wooden boxes. (Riedel even makes two glasses- one with a steam and one without-specifically designed for sake.) “I try to present sake in a way that replicates how we present wine,” Scalice says. “I show the customer the bottle and explain it in a way that’s as unforeign as possible. I try to make sake fun and accessible and not too serious, so that people don’t think it’s somehow beyond them.”

“We tried giving sake its own page, but it died a slow death,” Roberts says. Once he listed sakes alongside the wines by the glass, sales increased. “Now customer reception is off the charts.”

When gently encouraged to try something new with their food, Roberts says, his customers are surprisingly pleased with the pairing. “Diners are intrigued by it,” he says. “Even people who are big-time wine collectors…When you pour them some sake, they’re blown away. It’s a taste of something out of the norm.”

Thanks to increased demand abroad, Japanese brewers are able to produce and export better sake to the United States. There’s also a handful of domestic sake producers; Takara Sake, Hakusan, Gekkeikan, NapaSaki and Ozeki are all located in Northern California, whose Sacramento Valley is a source of top-quality rice.

Bacchus Importers, Ltd. - 1817 Portal Street - Baltimore, Maryland 21224 - Phone (410) 633-0400 - Toll Free: (800) 525-9699 Much of the credit for the proliferation of sake in America is given to importers such as Kazu Yamazaki of the Japanese Prestige Sake Association, Ed Lehrman of Vine Connections and Chris Pearce of World Sake Imports, who supply many of the nation’s top sake destinations and help sommeliers build their sake programs. But the final and most important task, says Pearce, who is also director of International Sake Association, is convincing diners to give sake s chance. “No matter how good a sake is, it won’t be successful if a restaurant can’t sell it effectively,” he says. “As long as the chef likes sake and thinks it goes well with food, [sake has] a chance.”

Despite sake’s growing popularity, don’t expect to see encyclopedic selections anytime soon. Unlike wine, sake is perishable and loses its qualities as it ages. Most non- Japanese restaurants maintain a rotating list of four to 12 varieties. “To carry more than that would be redundant and require a lot of connoisseurship in the public that doesn’t exist yet,” Stone says. “Having five or six sakes on the list is a challenge for most restaurants already.”

But in the same way that something as simple as grapes can create a complex drink, so can sake’s simple elements, says Gauntner: “You forget that the ingredients are rice and water. It’s remarkable, because there’s so much going on.”

Sake For Beginners

How Sake is Made:

Like wine, sake begins with simple ingredients (in this case rice and water) that are transformed through accumulated wisdom and deft craftsmanship into a complex beverage.

Premium sake falls into two main: honjozo (to which a small amount of distilled alcohol is added) and junmai (pure rice sake). Most of the premium sake served by restaurants is junmai, which has more depth and complexity than common table sake, or futsuu.

Although water is the source of sake’s terroir (Japan’s best sake prefectures are located near premium water sources), rice and how it is handled are essential to the finished product. Specially cultivated rice is milled before the fermentation process begins. How much rice grain’s husk is milled away determines the sake’s grade and flavor profile; the more a grain is polished, the more complex and refined the finished sake will smell and taste. The three main grades of junmai sake are junmai (at least 30 percent of the rice grain has been milled away), ginjo (at least 40 percent) and daiginjo (at least 50 percent, up to 65 percent in the finest sakes). Ginjo sake tends to be more fragrant and complex than junmai, and daiginjo-the sake equivalent of cult Cabernet-even more so.

There are also several specialized styles of sake, including the zippy, milky white nigori (“cloudy”) sake and the robust koshu (“old”) sake, the latter of which is aged for at least seven years.

Buying and Storing Sake:

Sake is usually bottled and sold the year it is produced and is best consumed within six months of shipping (look for a release date printed on the bottle). This fragile drink perishes more quickly when stored at room temperature, so beware of wine shops that don’t store sake in refrigerators. “It’s like buying milk that wasn’t kept in a refrigerator,” says Leonard Phillips, owner of New York’s Ambassador Wines and Spirits, who keeps his entire sake selection chilled. At home, you should do the same.

Sake labels can be hard to navigate, but some American importers are adding their own back labels to help explain the drink within. Memorizing the basic sake grades and a couple of favorite producers (Dewazazkura, Kamoizumi, Masumi, Okunomatsu and Wakatake are all brands to look for) will also reduce the guesswork in selecting a great sake.

Bacchus Importers, Ltd. - 1817 Portal Street - Baltimore, Maryland 21224 - Phone (410) 633-0400 - Toll Free: (800) 525-9699