Local Rice Makes the Sake World Bigger
When I started defining the type of sake I wanted to brew, the first thing I wanted to learn was about sake terroir, and the first thing you learn is that you are talking about water. For an outsider like me, this sounds strange, especially since the first interest that I had in brewing sake was because I wanted to use my rice, a local rice harvested in Ebro’s Delta. I wasn’t thinking about water. I discovered sake looking for possibilities to create cool things with rice. And once I tasted the junmai sake style, I fell in love at first sip.
Going back to the story, once you start entering the sake world, you learn that it is very difficult to brew sake with rice that does not have very precise characteristics. For that reason, the industry has evolved, where almost everybody is using a few varieties of rice, being the Yamada Nishiki from Hyogo the king of the kings. This is because of two reasons:
- it is easier, though never easy, to brew good sake with it
- it gives the sake the taste profile that has been considered "perfection"
For that reason, since the 90s, when this trend imposed, the brewers have been using and improving their brewing skills to dominate this kind of rice. The big difference between sakes is the skills of the toji and the water. For some time, the terroir has been the water and the toji, since in every guild of Japan there is a style.
Coming from a wine culture, I remember something similar happening with wine where everybody was using, for the same reasons, the same grape varieties. Nowadays this has changed: everybody is rescuing local grape varieties. The reasons are to increase diversity, open the wine to more palates, and to promote local wine regions differentiation.
My opinion is that the same thing is going to happen with sake. Using different rice varieties will create more different kinds of sake that will help increase the number of sake adepts and help rice farmers and rice areas around the world.
When I started brewing back in 2008, I tried different rice varieties to find the perfect one because I couldn't understand sake brewed by me that wasn't using local rice. At the end, I was promoting a rice area. I knew I wasn't going to get the perfect sake rice, but I was able to find one that worked. At the beginning, I thought I just needed a rice that provided good flavor. In the end, I learned that what I actually needed is a big enough, rounded rice with good shinpaku and the perfect amylose-amylopectin composition, which doesn't break during the polishing operations. After 5 years of trying all the local varieties, I found one.
Because local opinion is important in choosing the rice variety, I organized many sake tastings with local customers. Doing so, I realized that they needed a fusion sake, more adapted to their palate with a more wine profile, meaning more aromatic and less alcoholic. Actually, this makes total sense because the customers here have a palate adapted to wine. My guess was choosing a local rice would make sake more romantic and flavorful too because the terroir will provide local flavors that are more recognizable to the local palate.
As is happening with Japanese food, sake needs to be a little bit adapted to a local palate, at least for a while.
I know that using this rice path is going to be harder and longer, and not everybody will understand my sake, or share my vision. But since we launched in 2015, we have been improving, and increasing demand. Now, after two years, we feel the market is more ready for a more Japanese sake, which is why we launched, two weeks ago, a Genshu style.
Using a local variety is necessary to make sake global. Luckily, these days, a lot of Japanese tojis are sharing my opinion, where there is a quest to brew great and different sakes using your local rice.