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The New Year is all about fresh starts and exploring new horizons. West London Wine School is here to help you take full advantage of this clean state in 2022 and want to invite you to join us on a journey into the fascinating and fabulous world of sake - starting with an Introduction to Sake Tasting on 14th January.
Book your spot on this fantastic new course and keep reading for more interesting facts on Sake. And if you want to know more about our fabulous new Sake Tutor, Sarah Stewart - author of this blog (our first ever blog!), follow this link for her bio.
This magical drink is popping up on the beverage lists of renowned restaurants and bars in the UK and globally as more sommeliers, chefs and consumers discover its charms and pairing versatility. At the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal serves his signature “Sounds of the Sea” dish with Masumi Nanago Junmai Daiginjo sake as part of the standard beverage pairing option.
The French Laundry’s Thomas Keller matches his infamous ‘Oysters and Pearls’ course with Sohomare Tuxedo Kimoto Junmai Daiginjo. Alain Ducasse recently produced a sparkling sake in conjunction with renowned brewery Shichiken. Joel Robuchon collaborated with the powerhouse Dassai to launch a concept restaurant in Paris pairing traditional French food with sake.
Every year more and more of these collaborations are happening and many are being spearheaded by the country we think of as the bastion of traditional wine culture and food pairing: France. What is inspiring these chefs and visionaries to look beyond wine?
Sake offers just as much complexity, depth and breadth as wine and provides access to a whole new range of aroma and flavour profiles that don’t exist in the wine world – it’s like finding a whole new range of previously unknown colours to paint with.
Sake is also easier to pair with food than wine in many respects, thanks to a few key features: no tannins, lower acidity (and different types of acids), higher sweetness and boatloads of the magical fifth taste, umami (‘savouriness’). There is a saying in Japanese that “sake and food do not fight” – it’s much harder to create an unpleasant food/sake combination than it is in the wine world.
Pairing wine with the complex dishes often included in multi-course Michelin restaurant menus can be a challenge and so the inclusion of sake in the cellar provides a new and versatile tool. Many people only think about ordering sake when in a Japanese restaurant – why does sake only have to go with sushi and sashimi?
We don’t only drink Burgundy with French food or Spanish wines with tapas, so why do we pigeonhole this hugely versatile group of beverages to only accompany food from its place of origin? We can also enjoy most wines on their own as an aperitif or just to lounge on the couch with and enjoy on their own – sake has the very same potential for enjoyment and “smashability”, as our own Jimmy Smith likes to say.
So, what exactly IS sake, you may ask? Of all the beverage classes it’s the one with the most misconceptions around it, so we’ll try and clear a few of those up right off the bat. Sake is a fermented beverage – not distilled – that is made from rice, water, yeast and a magical mould called koji - aka Aspergillus oryzae, the official National Mould of Japan and the magical secret ingredient in sake, soy sauce, miso and many other classic Japanese ingredients. The alcohol content of sake can range from 12-22%, but the vast majority of sake sits in the 15-16% range - similar to a big Spanish red or a New World wine.
How does sake compare to other fermented drinks wine and beer? It does share some similarities with each beverage, but also has key differences that set it apart. The sake brewing process is a bit closer to beer brewing than winemaking, but the resulting aromatics and profile of the finished product is more akin to a wine (and benefits greatly from being enjoyed in a wine glass as a result).
Sake generally should be refrigerated like a craft beer for storage and enjoyed within a year or two of production rather than laying it down like a wine to improve with age – but exceptions do exist, and some producers age their sake and this small but exciting subclass is a great rabbit-hole to fall down.
There are many more similarities and differences to explore that we will delve into in our upcoming classes, but the key take-home for now is that sake isn’t simply ‘rice wine’ or ‘a rice beverage brewed like beer’ – it is complex and interesting enough to be counted as its own unique product class. The basics of its fermentation process are a great example of this.
The fermentation of grape juice into wine is quite straightforward: crush the fruit and then allow yeast to directly ferment the sugars into alcohol, since the sugars in the juice are freely accessible for the yeast to access. Making beer from whole grains is a bit more complicated, since the sugars the yeast needs access to are tied up in long starch molecules that yeast can’t act on directly.
The malting process essentially produces enzymes that break down starches into simple sugars by germinating the grain, converting the inaccessible energy stored as starch into sugars that yeast can then convert into alcohol. Unlike the simple single-step fermentation process in wine, beer production requires two sequential steps: first convert the starch in the grain into sugars, and then the yeast converts the sugars into alcohol.
To make sake from rice, the starch in the grain must also first be converted to sugars so the yeast can act on it. However, unlike the whole grains used to make beer, rice must first be polished to remove the outer layers of the grain as these contain proteins and fats that may cause unwanted flavours in the finished product – as a result, germination isn’t possible since the germ of the grain (and all its associated stored enzymes) has been removed.
So, what to do? How can the starch be converted into sugars for the yeast to ferment? This is where that magical National Mould of Japan comes in: koji. Around 20-30% of the rice in a batch of sake is first inoculated with koji mould, which produces enzymes that can then convert the starch in the rice into sugars for the yeast. However, unlike beer brewing where these two steps are happening sequentially one after the other, when making sake these two processes happen simultaneously, in the SAME fermentation tank.
Think about how complicated it is to make good wine (a simple fermentation with one step), and then how complex beer brewing is (a complex fermentation with two sequential steps). Sake production ups the difficulty ante by quite a few notches here and requires sake brewers to maintain a delicate balance between these two variables for the entire fermentation process. If the enzymes break down the rice starch into sugars too quickly it can overwhelm the yeast and damage or kill them, but if the enzymes don’t work fast enough the yeast will be starved of the sugars they need.
Sake brewers require a huge amount of technical skill to effectively manage this process and there are endless variations in the style and taste of a finished product that can be made. This creates a huge variety of different sake styles in the market, making the study of sake a fascinating (and delicious) endeavour indeed!
There are many areas of debate in the wine world to keep students and aficionados busy discussing. The influence of the grapes and terroir versus the winemaker and product process is one that inspires much passion on both sides – and we are having the same debate in the sake world.
With wine it’s often said that the quality of the finished product is “90% the grapes and 10% the winemaker” – in the sake world, this ratio is flipped. While we can - and do - certainly see specific character in the sake coming from the raw ingredients like the rice varietal used (strains like Yamada Nishiki, the “king of sake rice” and Omachi, the favourite varietal of sake geeks for its unique herbaceous character, often leave a recognizable impact) or the water hardness/softness, ultimately it is the decision-making by the master brewer and their team that make the biggest impact on the finished product.
You can probably guess from the brief mention of the complex fermentation steps above that there are countless variables that brewers can tweak during the process that may impact the final sake. One of the biggest variables controlled by brewers is the type of yeast used: while a few breweries do spontaneous fermentation with wild yeast, the vast majority will inoculate the fermentation with a specific yeast strain that has a huge impact on the resulting aromatic profile of the finished sake.
There are dozens of different sake yeasts in use, with more being added every year and, alongside rice varietals and water types, students of sake get to delve into the wild world of yeasts as part of their study. When we blind taste sake, it is actually easier to identify the particular yeast type used than it is to be certain of the rice varietal!
Many of us who study wine love how it serves as a window into the history of a place – for me, this was one of the best parts of the Wine Scholar Guild courses. Well, if you are interested in history, you are going to LOVE studying sake. There are about 1,200 active breweries in Japan right now, and a quarter of these were founded before 1800. The ten oldest breweries still running in Japan today are all over 450 years old! Learning the stories of these breweries and the unique insight their long histories brings to their products is one of the many joys of sake – we are really looking forward to sharing some of these amazing producer stories with you at our upcoming classes.
There is so much to learn and appreciate within the sake world: hundreds of years of brewing history and different production methods, the impact of the raw ingredients and the brewers on the final product, and how the national beverage of Japan is leaving behind its national borders and expanding across the globe creating legions of new passionate fans along the way. We hope you will join us and become one of these fans – why not start with our Introduction to Sake Tasting class coming up on January 14th?
There’s no better way to start the New Year off on a great footing than learning something new (and fun!). We have lots more planned for the rest of 2022: cheese and sake pairing, exploring special styles of sake like koshu (aged sake) and sparkling varieties, deep-dives into different rice varietals, yeasts and starter culture methods, sake production in Japan versus here in the UK and elsewhere overseas (did you know we have three great British sake breweries already?!), sake history and more. If you are inspired to take your sake studies to the next level and earn a credential along the way, we will also be offering courses from WSET and the Sake Sommelier Association. We hope to see you there!
Have we captured your attention? Book your spot on our first Intro to Sake Course taking place on 14th January 2022. And if you're a fan of forward planning, we are also hosting a Sake and Cheese Pairing Evening on the 25th February 2022 - for more information and to book your spot, click here. Both are superb gifts for your trendy & explorative friends and family.
[Written by Sarah Stewart]
