SAKE BLEU!

While French winemaking runs in his blood, OLIVIER SUBLETT attained self-actualisation when he successfully created a rice wine, Le Guishu, for the Chinese market. Mischa Moselle finds out more

when French winemaker Olivier Sublett married a Dane, and then a Chinese woman, little did he know that both his ex and his current wife would help him create an entirely new category of drink.

Likewise, in a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences, when China’s leader Xi Jinping started his anti-corruption campaign, he couldn’t have known that he would push Sublett into realising the new project.

The project in question is, of course, Sublett’s Le Guishu. But don’t confuse the French rice wine with Japanese sake or Chinese yellow wine; it bears little resemblance to the first and none at all to the second. Made from grains grown in Camargue in southern France, it has a structure similar to that of its Japanese counterpart but very different flavours, not to mention a lower alcohol content of just 12.5 percent (undiluted sake contains 18 to 20 percent alcohol). If you had to compare it to a drink, it would be a grape wine – but even then, only two of the three wines in the Le Guishu range have flavours similar to Alsace Gewurztraminer wines; the last is a total outlier.

While rice has been grown in the Rhone Delta region for some 400 years, it has only been cultivated seriously since World War II, when Vietnamese labour was brought in to construct Z irrigation infrastructure much like those found in farms in the Mekong Delta, at that point a French colony. Before Sublett made wine with it, rice was mainly eaten in paellas by the region’s Spanish gypsy population.

So what role did the Chinese president play in all this? The story goes that in 2012, Sublett made a sales visit to China and sold 13 containers of his conventional bordeaux Chateau de Roques to a client in Hangzhou. He returned in 2013 to find that the client only wanted one container, as the drinking or gifting of French wine was seen as a faux pas in the new China.

Sublett realised he had to find a new way to make money – and soon. That night over dinner, his client introduced him to a Hangzhou Chinese yellow wine he had never tried before and the idea of a French rice wine was born. “I didn’t want to make yellow wine – the Chinese do that already – but I did want to do something of that quality with rice,” says Sublett.

His willingness to gamble on something new may have its roots in his ancestry. While one side of the family is purebred French and has been making St. Emilion wines since 1822, there is a Texan grandfather with ancestors who were part of the 19th-century Lewis and Clark Expedition that explored the newly expanded America after the Louisiana Purchase of land from France doubled its size.

But if the courage is hereditary, it clearly hasn’t spread to the rest of the family: The other Sublett winemakers think he’s mad – or a traitor to bordeaux wines.

The self-professed “arrogant” Frenchman admits that his first few attempts were “terrible”; much of what he did was trial and error. “I tried ageing it in oak barrels, but it turned blue,” he shares. “It was something to do with the ph value and the starch in the rice.”

Eventually, he turned to his ex-wife’s Danish brewing connections for advice. “It was helpful, but I wasn’t satisfied,” he says, adding that his arrogance in thinking that he could achieve something was what pushed him to continue with the project.

So he organised a tasting of different versions of the drink – but decided that they

were all bad. He was on the verge of throwing in the towel when his current wife offered: “Mix Batch Nine with Batch 11 and it might work.”

And thus it was that Sublett finally had a drink he could work with and sell to restaurants. He found that chefs loved it and were willing to create quite daring food pairings with it. “Chefs like it because it excites them; it stimulates their creativity, their imagination,” he says. “It’s something new, different from what they’ve had before.”

The winemaker is now on to the second edition of the Le Guishu range, having tweaked the formulas. The dry Assemblage, with 20 percent grape wine, is “like an elegant Gewurztraminer, with rose and lychee on the palate, and is a good match for various Asian cuisines,” says Sublett, adding that it pairs well with sushi and sashimi, as well as Cantonese seafood and other subtle dishes from that cuisine.

Meanwhile, the semi-dry Non Filtré is sold as a match for spicy food because it has no tannins, which interfere with spice. “It has more power, with pineapple and pear, and a hint of rose and lychee. There is more complexity here, especially the bouquet,” explains the winemaker, who believes it’s the best match for other Chinese cuisines because of the mix of flavours – sweet and sour, sweet and salty – or the spicy or just very salty flavours in the dishes.

Rounding up the range is the sweet wine, L’umami, which is even more diverse in its food pairings – it works beautifully with eggs, for instance, which are notoriously difficult to match. There is one thing it doesn’t work with though: sweet dishes.

One of Sublett’s first customers, Chef Jean-luc Rabanel of the two-michelin-starred L’atelier de Jean-luc Rabanel, once commented that after an initial sweetness on the nose and palate reminiscent of coconut, honey, orange zest and osmanthus, the wine takes on an umami note.

“And that’s why it just doesn’t work with créme brûlée or tiramisu, which you can find on the menu of any French bistro,” says Sublett. “It cannot stand up to the sweetness of sweet dishes.”