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Editor's Note: This is the second installment of Dave Lowry's four-part exposé on sake. If you missed part one, it's right here.
Sake isn’t any more difficult to understand than wine—which means it’s pretty damned difficult. It doesn’t help that we still don’t have a lot of top- or even medium-level sake available in most of the country. It isn’t easy to get a lot of tasting experience. The problem is compounded by so much of sake’s terminology being in Japanese.
Over the years, we’ve come up with reasonable equivalents to most French wine terms. Grand cru: “great growth.” Gout de pierre a fusil: “flinty.” Sommelier: “expensive restaurant.” But when sake snobs get together and start talking about fukumi-bana or a sake’s shiri-pin, they may as well be speaking Klingon*. It's kind of intimidating. Even so, if you can understand about half a dozen terms, you’ve got a fairly good handle on sake.
First, though, be clear on what the stuff is: Sake is, like beer, brewed. It isn’t, however, carbonated, so it’s closer in taste, to wine. Sake isn’t ever distilled. Basically, sake is rice and water. What makes the magic is koji, a mold that conjures enzymes that convert the rice’s starches to sugar. (Yeast, added separately, turns the sugar to alcohol.) In the good old days, these enzymes came from the mouths of girls who chewed the rice, then spat it into barrels. Now koji does the trick, if less theatrically, then certainly more hygienically. Similar koji, incidentally, is used to produce soy sauce.
Sake’s alcohol content is around 16%, not much more than wine.
Broadly, there four versions of sake:
Junmai. It’s written with characters that mean “pure rice.” That’s essentially what junmai sake are: rice, water, and the koji mold that kick-starts fermentation. No other alcohol is added. Think of it the way the Germans do beer: barley, hops, and water, period. Junmaishu, or junmai sake, will be heavier, with more body, than other kinds of sake. Junmai varieties are generally the kinds that go best with food—or at least they are the kinds most easily matched with food.
Honjozo. These are sakes that have had alcohol added sometime during the brewing process. They tend to be lighter, more refined, and with more subtlety and variations of taste.
It’s reasonable to conclude that junmai sake are the pure essence of the stuff, while honjozo is trying to hype the hooch to give drinkers a bigger buzz. Reasonable conclusion. But, like most of your stock picks, wrong. The alcohol that’s added doesn’t really provide more of a punch. In fact, water’s usually added as well to even things out, and the overall alcohol content of junmai and honjozo are essentially the same.
Both junmai and honjozo can also be divided further by the degree of polish to which the individual rice grains are subjected before brewing. The more the grain’s polished, the more cellulose and other stuff that doesn’t contribute directly to sake-making is lost. The results make for a more nuanced, delicate taste. Ginjo sake is made from rice that’s had up to 40% of its kernel polished away. Rice for a daiginjo sake will have had around half of their size removed. Daiginjo include the superstars of the sake world, with as little as 30% of the grain left.
Futsu-shu. Remember plain label beer? Futsu-shu is the sake equivalent. “Table sake” is a polite way to put it. It’s cheap, with little of the flavor and range of good sake. Chances are, if a restaurant’s serving sake and they don’t mention what kind it is, it’s futsu-shu. This is the gutter rinse that’s usually served heated.
Japanese-made sake still dominates the market in the United States, but more and more breweries have opened here. Realistically speaking, American sake is to Japanese sake what American wines were, back in the late Sixties, to French wine. They have a long way to go, but they are making some remarkable strides.
(*Shiri-pin refers to the “tail” of sake, to the taste that lingers on after swallowing. Fukimi-bana is a technique sake connoisseurs use to suck in air along with the sake, then exhale it through the nose, the better to spread its taste all over the palate. How to translate these into Klingon we’ve no idea.)
