Sake

I remember the first time I tasted sake, and sushi for that matter, back when I was in college in the 80s. A friend who studied in Japan took me to a sushi bar on Irving Place in Manhattan, where he introduced me to raw fish on rice and sake served as hot as a steaming mug of coffee.

At 8am the toji, the sake brew master, makes his morning rounds. He inspects the moto, a mingling of rice, water, koji rice, yeast and lactic acid that fulminates for about two weeks. He steps into the warm, fecund koji room to check out cottony mold blooming on steamed rice spread on large wooden trays. He works a twelve foot pole to stir the moromi -- the sake mash -- moto, rice, water and koji percolating in thirteen hundred gallon steel tanks, a mixture like gurgling oatmeal that ferments for about twenty five days before being pressed to release clear liquid -- sake.

One nondescript conference room. Sixteen bottles of sake. A half dozen of the best sake-tasting palates in New York. Henry Sidel, who runs Joto Sake, pulled together this group last week to evaluate a bunch of brews he recently brought back from Japan. He invited me to join in and observe.

A hearty congratulations to my friends Rick and Hiroko (that's her in picture) on the one year anniversary of their wonderful shop Sakaya, the only store on the East Coast dedicated to premium, small-batch, artisanal sake and shochu. In honor of their milestone -- and to help us all find a great some sake -- I asked them to recommend a few of their favorite bottles of nihonshu for the holidays.

When I sat down with my friends Chizuko Niikawa and Akiko Ito today, both Akita natives, both sake experts, I posed a simple question: What makes Akita sake so special?

I've been trying to learn more about sake, so when my friend Henry Sidel, the owner of importer Joto Sake, invited me to raise a glass of nihonshu with a 15th...

My friend Henry Sidel, the president of the boutique sake importer Joto Sake, invited me to his class this past week at Murray's Cheese, New York's best cheese...

I wanted to visit a traditional sake brewery while I was in Yamagata, so I stopped in to see the Wada family. Their ancestors have been making sake here since...