Experts offer tips on pairing sake with food
When Osaka native Iori Kataoka opened her Japanese restaurant on Vancouver’s West Side in 2005, she hoped to offer a menu that paired the dishes of her home country with sake. She found herself making matches with wine instead—but not for lack of trying.
“There wasn’t enough sake available,” Kataoka says in an interview downtown. “There was industrial sake in a box that you heated up to hide the flaws.
There were only three kinds, and they all came in boxes.”
Things have changed since her Zest Japanese Cuisine launched more than a decade ago. That restaurant has just been reborn as Yuwa Japanese Cuisine (2775 West 16th Avenue), with a mission to highlight the country’s regional variations. Well-known restaurants everywhere from Paris to New York are specializing in sake, and given the proliferation of highquality sake available on local liquorstore shelves now, Kataoka is going back to her original plan.
“Doing sake and food pairings was a dream from the beginning,” Kataoka says. “A lot of people still say, ‘Oh, I can’t drink sake.’ But there’s not just one kind of sake. There is so much to explore.
“Pairing it with food has the same rules, the same ideas, as wine,” she adds. “You look for something that’s going to complement or contrast the flavours.”
Kataoka is a certified advanced sake professional with Tokyo’s Sake Education Council and a kikisakeshi,
or sake sommelier. In 2008, she opened Shuraku Sake Bar and Bistro (833 Granville Street), which serves about 30 different types of the fermented rice wine. Both it and Yuwa offer sake pairings and sake flights.
Sake is made from rice that is polished, washed, and steamed. Different categories of sake are broken down in terms of how much each grain of rice is milled. Premium sake has been polished at least 30 percent, which means that 70 percent of each grain remains. It then gets more complicated than that, depending on whether any distilled alcohol is added.
World Sake Day takes place every year on October 1. That date was chosen because it’s the traditional starting date of sake production in Japan. San Francisco, which has the largest Sake Day celebration outside of Japan, has celebrated for the past 12 years. The Sake Association of British Columbia, meanwhile, kicked off its annual celebration last year. This year’s event will include a trade portion featuring products from 21 brewers and importers from Japan, Canada, and the United States, as well as consumer tasting of dozens of different grades and classifications.
Lara Victoria, founder of Cru Classe Hospitality Corp., is another local sake expert. She travelled to Japan earlier this year to become certified by the London-based Wine and Spirit Education Trust as a sake educator in a program sponsored by the Japanese government. She was one of eight people from around the world (and the only Canadian) to be invited. (Victoria is teaching a WSET Level 1 Award in Sake class on October 7 at Vandusen Botanical Garden.)
While in Japan, Victoria learned this expression: “Sake does not fight with food.”
“I have yet to find a food that does not go nicely with sake,” Victoria says in an interview in Chinatown. “It’s amazing with fish and chips or with clam chowder. I would like to see every seafood restaurant in B.C. carry sake.
“It’s great with spicy food,” she adds. “Sake and Indian food are best friends. Or Malaysian food; it would be great with beef biryani.”
Victoria notes that sake is naturally gluten-free and is devoid of sulphites, unlike most wine. She says sake would also pair well with something simple like a grilled panini with roasted tomatoes and peppers and cheese. On a cold and rainy day, Victoria would serve sake with a pot roast containing root vegetables. She says it even goes nicely with desserts, including chocolate.
Food-and-sake pairings at Yuwa include sockeye salmon sanshozuke-ae, a dish found in Hokkaido or Tohoku. Served with taro chips, it consists of salmon and avocado tartare marinated in shio-koji malt soy sauce with spicy green pepper and bits of rice cracker.
“When you are having a spicy item, go with sake that’s slightly sweet,” Kataoka says. “It’s the same idea as Riesling with spicy Chinese food. I would suggest nigori sake, which is cloudy sake, as it complements the koji rice malt and it has sweetness.”
Sizzling wagyu steak, meanwhile, would go nicely with a junmai yamahai sake, which has a wild, gamy flavour. “This sake’s higher acidity level cuts through the oiliness of wagyu beef,” Kataoka says. “Its mushroom and earthy tones complement beef. When it’s warmed gently, it’s very comforting in colder weather.”
The Vancouver Sake Fest takes place on Thursday (September 28) at the Imperial (319 Main Street).
Oh, what a summer we’ve had in the B.C. wine industry.
As local wildfires and thick smoke dominated the conversation almost as much as they did our skies, there were a few seismic shifts on the business side of things that had heads turning and jaws dropping throughout the province.
It was the third week of June when Ontario-based Andrew Peller Limited, the parent company of B.c.–based wineries Peller Estates, Red Rooster Winery, and Sandhill (among others), announced the coming retirement of its long-time master winemaker, Howard Soon.
Soon—who was raised on Vancouver’s West Side and graduated from Kitsilano Secondary School— worked toward what would be his lifelong career by studying biochemistry at UBC and then business administration at the University of Manitoba.
He then joined
Andrew Peller’s family business at
Calona Wines, beginning what would be 37 consecutive vintages working as winemaker for the expanding company.
Nowadays he’s best known for the Sandhill wine project, which began in 1997 with a focus on single-vineyard wines and an innovative “small lots” project where Canadian wine enthusiasts were exposed to uncommon (around these parts) singlevarietal wines like Sangiovese and Barbera, along with takes on red Bordeaux blends and the Super Tuscan wines of Italy.
Soon, an enthusiastic ambassador for Canadian wines, was known for ensuring the vineyard where the grapes grew shared the marquee with the brand name on the front of his wines’ bottles, along with each vineyard’s grower getting name-dropped on the back of the bottle. Although this may be de rigueur now, shining a light on terroir, back in the day it certainly wasn’t as common. Local winemakers barely encountered their fruit or put much stock in growing conditions until it was purchased and arrived at the winery for processing.
I first met the guy back in 2000, when I was serving and overseeing the wine program at (the recently shuttered) Trafalgars Bistro in Kitsilano, not too far from where Soon grew up. With his Vancouverbased wine agent, he had come in to meet me and taste me through a flight of his wines. The moment he walked into the restaurant, his dedication to the vineyard was apparent. Actually, the very moment he walked in, I thought he was bringing his own food or something, because he was carrying a big pasta bowl covered with plastic wrap. As we sat down and he began to remove the covering, I saw that what he actually had was a bowl of dirt from one of his vineyards. Before we talked grapes, before we talked wine, and way before we talked sales, we talked soil and why it mattered. The vineyard was his first priority and, to him, the most important part.
Back to this summer and the announcement of his retirement.
Although he’d had a lengthy, lauded, and award-winning career, he is a family man and it seemed logical that this would be a good time to put his feet up. At the same time, in this industry—which is driven, in large part, by passion—it’s rare that its legends call it quits for good. One only has to look at other Canadian wine veterans to see the truth of this: Harry Mcwatters of Sumac Ridge fame is commemorating his 50th year in the business and is now just beginning his new Time Winery project in Penticton, and Don Triggs of Jackson-triggs fame is now at the helm of his newish Oliver project, the Culmina Family Estate Winery. Those curious about what, if anything, Soon was going to do next were immediately distracted by the early-september news that Andrew Peller had acquired the Okanagan Valley’s Black Hills Estate Winery, Tinhorn Creek Vineyards, and Gray Monk Estate Winery.
It was as the dust was settling on that news that the question about Soon got answered. On September 25, a news release landed in industry email inboxes announcing that Similkameen Valley–based Vanessa Vineyards have brought on Soon as their master winemaker. Hardly new to that land, Soon has been working with Vanessa’s fruit since its inception in 2006, as much of it was sold to Peller for its Sandhill wines and others, and the sturdy and concentrated wines under the winery’s eponymous label were made under licence by Soon and his team.
The Similkameen’s hot, dry conditions, coupled with well-drained soil rich in calcium carbonate, make Vanessa Vineyards’ 30 hectares prime for the Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Petit Verdot, and Syrah that occupy much of their land. Soon’s appointment is also a hearty endorsement of the Similkameen region as a whole: although it makes up less than 10 percent of B.C.’S vineyard acreage, I’d venture to say that a higher percentage of our quality wines is coming from there (see Orofino Winery, Clos du Soleil Winery, Little Farm Winery, and the like).
Let me be among the first to welcome Soon back to the industry after what must be one of the shortest retirements ever. I look forward to seeing what comes out of this new bowl of dirt.