Sake. Very interesting beverage. My Kyoto experience

Just spent 2 weeks in Japan (Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto and surrounding area). Amazing time, great experiences, culminating with the Mt Fuji climb (It’s cold up there! And windy!!).

Back to the point. Sake. I came over here knowing little. Yeah, I’d go to a sushi/sashimi place and order whatever the waiter/waitress recommended. Also the occasional larger event. But really I knew little beyond this idea that when you polish off more of the rice the sake gets better.

In Kyoto I went on a sake tour for about 2 hours. Like wine tasting in Napa. Hit a bunch of the brewers, tried their stuff, also some shops that were doing tastings, etc. My take was that there are ‘new school’ makers who make Daiginjo, Ginjo, Honjozo and Futsu-shu (in descending order of quality, Daiginjo as the best with the most polishing). And ‘Traditional’ makers who make Junmai Daiginjo, Junmai Ginjo and Junmai (also in descending order of quality, with Junmai Daiginjo having the most polishing so over 50% of the rice gone). We also tried some with different ages and after the tasting I decided that the ‘best’ for me was the Junmai Daiginjo with 1-2 years of age on it. In hindsight, it’s like saying “I like pinot noir with 5 years of age” without any thought to region or producer.

So then I went to a sake bar called Yoramu in Kyoto. Had a 2 hour tasting with 9 family/friends. I walked in with my new sake knowledge and said to the owner “I would like to try some Junmai Daiginjo with 1-2 years of age on it please”. Yeah. Cringe worthy. He said “first, you’re not pronouncing it correctly” . Nice start for me! So I told him to drive the bus, pick anything, but allow us to leave his bar with a greater understanding of sake. Wow. We tasted 1/2 glasses, to allow for more tasting. Maybe 20/25 different sake. Different age ranges, different levels of polishing, different producers. His view is that Junmai Daiginjo, the one where the rice is polished off until it gets down to the kernel of starch is the least interesting, as all producers will taste about the same, with similar age, as it’s the other parts of the rice that contain the variation in flavor and allow the producer to show his craft with different yeasts, timing of yeast, temp, etc, etc. He had us taste some Junmai from some producers that he loved where he thought they had been using more interesting yeast. Fantastic! He had us try some Junmai Daiginjo with 2 years of age, from large producers, that had won awards. Eh (that was his point).

So what did I walk away with? So similar to Burgundy! Producer Producer Producer!!! And don’t worry about the grade too much. And this is going to take an eternity of tasting to find producers that fit this. Fun!!!

Any thoughts from others who know more than me about this topic (wouldn’t be hard to know more than me!)??

BTW, anyone in Kyoto who wants to learn about sake, I 100% recommend Bar Yoramu (www.sakebar-yoramu.com/ ). Tiny place with a passionate owner.

I have a very good friend who is a Saki Master and we drink a lot that he imports, sometime only single bottles. Some amazing stuff. My go to house saki is ‘Otter Fest 23’ from Dassai. It is Junmai Daiginjo and as the name implies it is polished to 23%. Very pure but fruity with a complex but clean finish. Dassai is actually a rather large producer making all quality and style levels. The brewery is in Yamaguchi. Imported by Mutual Trading in LA. My friend has served me several times the Dassai ‘Beyond’ which is their extremely small production and expensive saki. Amazing stuff. Their ‘50’ is also very good and much more affordable.

LOL, going by the bottle off a list is as complicated as it is for wine. Typically, if I go with daiginjo, I like to drink it to start off with cold dishes and move on to ginjo for hot ones. Tasting notes are really important for me since I don’t know a lot, and I use the Sake Meter Value (SMV) when available to get an idea of the style. That actually helped when we picked sake for our meal at SingleThread and were pretty spot on. We went with two ginjo, one for cold dishes and the other hot.

I think you’re right about the burgundy analogy. Producer can oftentimes outweigh location. It’s not coincidence that a lot of sake from Niigata is good, but there is a lot out there, even in warmer parts of the country.

Love this thread. I desperately need to make it back to Japan. One of my favorite beverage experiences was the high-end sake pairings at Ryugin in Tokyo. Outrageously expensive but fascinating and delicious. I need to drink it more here.

I’ve been building some sake understanding for some years now and visited Japan a year ago.

I’ve noticed that many Daiginjos are currently made with some obvious sweetness. This makes them feel bigger, more concentrated and weighty, leaving to a more “impressive” feel when somebody who knows very little of sake and tastes their first Daiginjo will find it quite powerful and full of oomph. The downside to this is that the sweetness makes all the Daiginjos taste quite the same - a fact that is only exacerbated by the fact that increasing the polish ratio will decrease the number of “impurities” of a rice grain that make a sake interesing. Perhaps the same thing would apply to a semi-sweet Apothic wine aged in a whisky barrel: it might feel very big and full of flavor to a person who doesn’t understand much about wine, but no wine enthusiast would be enthused by this wine.

This is not to say that all Daiginjos or sakes with obvious sweetness are bad - on the contrary, I have tasted some very lovely sweeter sakes as well. Harushika Narayaezakura Junmai was a very lovely effort that was fermented with an indigenous yeast collected from a cherry tree. The yeast couldn’t ferment the sake to full dryness, but produced a very fragrant sake with relatively high acidity, making the end product feel very vinous.

However, most of my favorites have been artisanal sakes made by obscure small breweries - some have been Junmai and some not. Many of these can be very much something unlike what a layperson would associate with sake and are more of Japanese equivalents to the most extreme examples of natural wine. However, most of these brewers remind you that these are how sakes used to be, before industrial practices and cultivated yeasts came and changed the face of traditional sake.

Great thread, interesting and informative! I’ve recently gotten the Sake itch and have started to try to taste, find what I like and buy more of it. A lot of times we’ll start off with a Sake for the first course, if the second wine is a pinot/burgundy/lighter style, and I’ve found it to be an interesting and fun combination.

The wife was really thrilled (insert sarcasm) when I started adding Sake to the wine/bourbon/tequila collection(s).

Good thread. This is helpful as I’m on plan to expand my Sake appreciation with a (mainly) Sake-tasting itinerary early next year.

flirtysmile Wow. Learnt so much from so few posts.

Calling this sake Dassai’s “Otter Fest 23” is like saying La Tâche’s Grand Cru “Task”. The sake is not produced by Dassai, but Asahi brewery and Dassai is just the name of the sake, meaning “Otter Festival” in Japanese. The whole name of the sake in question is Asahi Shuzo Dassai 23 Junmai Daiginjo.

Different producers all have their own koji culture. Makes a big difference in flavors. Koji is the microorganism which ferments and/or breaks down the complex starches into fermentable sugars.

I love namasake. (unpasteurized) flavors of salty, melon, ripe apple or pear.
I am on a list from a person WSET in Sake offers @namasakepaul on instagram. Namasake (similar to wine) must be shipped during cool weather and kept cold.

Thanks for this. We’re planning a trip to Japan and are sake enthusiasts!

Otto:

You’re not alone on this point.
I spend a decent amount of time in the company of toji, and when they’re speaking freely (usually after several rounds of sake) many of them can be quite disparaging about the whole ginjo-daiginjo thing.
Many of them find these types of sakes to be confected, heavy on the make-up… good for winning competitions and wowing folks with the first sip, but ultimately tiring to drink, especially with food. One friend dubbed the genre “making sake for people who’d rather be drinking wine”.
In many ways it parallels discussions about spoofiness in wine.

A truism for many of these guys is: if you want to know the measure of a sake maker’s prowess, try his honjozo… if you want to drink his best, grab a bottle of his junmaishu.

Cheers,

Wadachi bar very close to the Gion-Shijo station was also a very nice place with a good selection of different sake.

I love sake. It takes quite a while to really understand. Polishing isn’t everything. When I was in Kyoto, one of the best that I had was a local
sake that wasn’t high production. The complexity of a great sake is really something. Very nice discussion.

One question, my understanding of the word junmai is that it stands for using native yeast in fermentation instead of introducing the yeast. Is this true?

I think junmai simply meams it’s 100% rice sake i.e. not fortified.

This is correct. One can use cultivated yeasts or spontaneous fermentations, be it Junmai or not.

Thanks.

Otto, thank you for the correction. Of course you are correct. For so long I have just referred to it as Dassai 23 and got it in my head that Dassai is the producer. Still very much like this saki.