A discovery tour of Japanese wine

Last night I served up nine sakes, finishing with one infused with plums. 

I had wanted to do a sake tasting for years, but only felt confident enough to do it after a trip to Japan last year. I participated in sake tastings in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, visited a couple of sake breweries, and of course had it with almost every meal for three weeks. After that, I finally felt I knew just enough to be dangerous. 

The hardest part was finding a good selection of affordable sakes in Belgium. I was able to find good sakes, but they were way more expensive than in Japan and way more expensive than I'd expected, limiting my enthusiasm for future sake tastings. 

The reality is that even though everyone really enjoyed the sakes, and I was definitely able to demonstrate that they're the perfect pairing for a lot of Japanese foods from cucumber salad with sesames to yakitori to sushi, it's hard to defend spending three times the price of a good bottle of wine just to drink sake with your meal. A nice Prosecco or Cava would be just as good in most cases and a lot more affordable. For me sake will remain a relative novelty in Europe as long as it's so expensive. 

That said, people loved all the bottles, from the simpler junmai sakes that we started with to the more highly polished, aged, and fortified bottles that we tasted later. Several people said the Nanbu Bijin Tokubetsu Junmai and Kuromatsu Kenbishi were their favorite bottles, which helps justify their higher-than-average prices. I was very pleased with the Edo-style Shirayuki Genroku Vintage sake and the Takasago Konbu Umeshu, both of which were very different from the typical sakes that you would find in restaurants without knowing what to ask for.