One of the items long on my culinary bucket list has been learning about sake and homing in on the good stuff. It’s not easy for a wine lover with little experience in sake. How to even start to read a label of Japan’s national rice-based beverage?
On my first trip to Japan this spring, I achieved my goal, having tasted some delicious, delicate and inspiring sake, facilitated by a flourishing of boutique producers focused on excellence. Japan has several regions noted for making very different tasting sake, based largely on local varieties of rice and the qualities of the local groundwater. In Kyoto, I focused on the Fushimi district, home to about 20 producers.
Sake Terroir
Fushimi is prized for sake because of the abundance and quality of its medium-hard water that filters through the nearby Monoyama hills and is used by rice plantations and brewers. The water the rice plant absorbs impacts the taste of the grain. The same water is added during the fermentation process, impacting fermentation and the ultimate taste—80 percent of sake's volume comes from added water.
“Like with wine grapes, environmental factors and terroir are important,” explains Tokubee Masuda, the 14th-generation chairman of Masuda Tokubee Shoten, a pioneer for high-end sake under its Tsukino Katsura label. “Rice is important, but water is even more important.”
Founded in 1675, Masuda Tokubee is famous for the 13th generation’s work in the 1960s to revive Japan’s traditional lightly strained and milky nigori “cloudy” sake that had largely disappeared with modern filtering. The company began bottling a signature unpasteurized nigori bottling at the tail end of fermentation when it was still producing bubbles. The result is a naturally sparkling beverage, akin to a pét-nat wine.
In the last 60 years, the company has also gone deeper into aging sake in porcelain containers—releasing some astonishing lots of sake aged years or decades. Today, Masuda runs the brewery with his son, Junichi, 31, the company president.
Sake Production
Masuda Tokubee’s brewery is the size of a no-frills boutique winery, with a feel to match. It is divided between two wood-and-stone structures separated by a busy two-lane road that cuts through this largely residential neighborhood. On one side of the road is the historic brewery—now serving as office and tasting room—attached to the Masuda family home. On the other side is the current brewery facility.
Masuda, agile and energetic, led me on a tour of the works. In the last 30 years, he and other locals have helped revive Kyoto’s native signature Iwai sake rice. Today, he grows about 70 percent of the rice used in the brewery a few miles away. The brewery’s production scale is an artisanal 50,000 bottles—mostly 720 milliliters, slightly smaller than a wine bottle. That’s roughly equal to a 4,000-case winery.
While many breweries have moved to year-round production, Masuda has stuck to a traditional schedule. After the October rice harvest, the brewery polishes the rice with mechanical mills.
A “Rice Polishing Ratio” (RPR) is used as a measure of sake type. The non-fortified sake category Junmai Daiginjo requires polishing ratios up to 50 percentage—after protein- and oil-rich bran are milled away, half the rice kernel remains. Masuda’s ratios descend all the way to a superfine 35 percent—meaning that 65 percent of the rice’s weight is milled away. This makes for a more delicate style of sake, similar to an expressive white wine—think of a German Riesling or a Pinot Grigio from Friuli.
After the polished rice is hand washed, it is wrapped in porous cloth and steamed in large vats called koshiki. An early batch is used to make koji starter. For this, Masuda uses a traditional method of laying the rice out for more than four days in a warm wood room where it’s sprinkled with koji mold, which spreads through the rice. Koji, also used to make soy sauce and miso, converts rice starches to sugars for fermentation.
Next a “mother” is blended from steamed rice, koji and rice fermenting yeasts, then added to batches of steamed rice inside 5,000-liter, glass-lined vats for fermentation. After about a month of fermentation, the liquid is ready to be decanted and pressed from from the lees.
Variety Is the Spice of Sake
Masuda produces more than a dozen sakes with varying levels of filtering, polishing ratios, sweetness levels and body. At the bottom of a steep raw wood staircase, Masuda has me substitute my shoes for a pair of rubber clogs. I follow him upstairs to a room where hundreds of 20-liter porcelain jugs closed with wooden stoppers contain sake up to 59 years old.
Aged sake is a specialty for Masuda. Versions released 15 years after their brewing year retail for upwards of $1,000. Next year, Masuda plans to release up to 15 bottles of 50-year-old sake for a price many times that. “I want to show the world that sake can be this ultra-premium… ,” says Masuda with a grin, “… that it’s not just Romanée-Conti.”
In one corner, a small stereo speaker playing the plaintive sounds from the strings of a Chinese erhu is attached to an aging jug. “This sake has been listening to this same music for two and a half years,” says Masuda, explaining that it is destined for a client in China who wanted a music-cultured brew.
After we return across the road to his tasting room, Masuda pours from several bottles into various shaped glasses. The first standout for me is his sparkling nigori, served in a tumbler. It’s cold, fresh, delicate, slightly floral, near bone dry and full of fine bubbles. (It retails in the U.S. for about $60). It’s the kind of eye-opening stuff you want to pour for friends and watch disappear.
At the end of our tasting, he poured an aged 2019 sake into a glass that looked like a brandy snifter. Served at room temperature, the sake had turned a deep golden color, with sherry-like oxidative notes and wowing nutty complexity. Forget elaborate pairings: This is the kind of liquid I imagine consuming on its own.
I’d known a trip to Japan would be mind-expanding. These and other sake expressions also launched a new journey for my palate.
