Fields of barley, fields of gold,
Japanese whisky is the world’s best,
whisky is spoken in the west.
Fields of paddy, sake is another story.
Ingrained in the culture of a self-sufficient country, sake’s provincial image belies artisanship. The drink of Japan’s Imperial Court arrived with rice from China in the 2nd century BC, its brewing refined, and refined, for a portal to the divine.
Kuheiji Kuno is the 15th generation head of the family that has made sake since its ninth. With a dash of charisma and diffidence, he holds your attention, choosing words with care, synced with a thespian’s precise gestures. He says he wants to show the world why sake is part of the zeitgeist and as age-worthy as great wine.
Shouldn’t the world already know this? Kuheiji does not assume so. His interpreter is able, but it is his presence that brings the message home for guests at Sushi Hibiki in Four Seasons Kuala Lumpur.
He’s not only inspired by great wine; Kuheiji makes them as well in Burgundy, based in his eponymous domaine in the one-boulangerie village of Morey St Denis. He also grows rice with the local farmers of Camargue in the south of France to brew sake there. But it is along the river plains and mountains of Kurodasho in Hyogo prefecture, Japan, where he’s found what he considers sake’s finest terroir.
Talk of sake terroir is not the norm. This explanation is based on the writer’s limited view of a potentially wide-open field with a literally unseen underworld, perhaps one that we ignore at great cost.
To begin with the obvious, the soil and climate conditions for growing rice and grapes are different (soil and climate come hand in hand). Rice, a grain grown mainly in the tropics, requires irrigation, whereas grapes are a temperate fruit susceptible to mildew and rot in damp conditions; the grape vine is left to its own devices to draw sparingly from the natural water table in well-drained soils, at least for fine wine.
Kuheiji has said it is uncommon for brewers to make sake from rice they grow themselves, so to standardise or homogenise the variable quality of rice from external suppliers grown on different soils, they developed fermentation techniques to make sake of a consistent and acceptable taste.
Thus, the influence of fermentation on sake can be an overriding consideration for brewers. In short, the expression of terroir is usually not the main objective of sake brewers, unlike with fine wine.
The process of fermentation, as used to arrive at an average quality of rice from different suppliers, also means the effacement of the diverse attributes of the rice that arise from where they were grown (and, if we want to get serious, when, how, and by whom). In two words, geology and geography. In one, terroir.
Is great sake grown in the paddy fields or made in the brewery? Terroir can be as crucial for sake as it is for wine, Kuheiji says, because as with cépage, or grape variety, the hundred or more rice cépages used to make sake each grow best in different soils and climatic conditions.
Each vintage is a variation of the seasonal cycle that leaves its mark on the harvest, overlaying what came before it. Kuheiji prefers the rice to be left largely alone; to embrace, learn, and surmount the cycles to the benefit of future generations, not indulged and glossed over to be correct and inoffensive.
This makes the rice plants stronger, more diverse and adaptable come humans, hell and high water, and, for Kuheiji, more delicious and edifying for being transparent to their terroir. In the same vein, he facilitates the transformation of seeds: life in earth that emerges from soil to nourish life on it.
Without fermentation, however, there can be neither sake nor wine; someone has to organise the process and make the drinks (with or without the help of wild yeasts).
Here, the savoir-faire or know-how for sake and wine-making differ: wine begins to be made when the readily available sugars of grape juice are consumed by yeast. However, rice must first be turned into simple sugars before this can take place.
The junmai type of sake made by Kuheiji comprises just rice, water, and koji (more on which shortly). To make it, the rice grain is polished to the nth degree, shorn of its husk and outer layers protecting its pure and starchy heart. This is unlike for wine, where grapes are usually fermented on their skins together with their pressed juice.
The finely polished rice grains must be cooked, so water, sympathetic handling, and steaming methods all influence sake quality. The cooked rice is then sprinkled and inoculated with koji, which contains the fungus that unravels the carbs into sugars that yeast can consume. The microbes work as a team and might be indigenous, or not.
The 20th occasion of Sushi Hibiki’s Echo in the Night dinner series featured an omakase pairing menu of both sake and wine, made by a rare producer of both.
Makoto Saito Sam, owner and itamae of Sushi Hibiki, and Kuheiji’s collaborator, as well as the founder and organiser of the Sushi Summit events, had met Kuheiji in Japan, where he was given a personal tour of the fields and brewery by the latter.
Sam, as he’s known, is a seemingly restless thinker and doer who has invested himself into the minutiae of Sushi Hibiki for the prosperity of his customers. It’s a given that an itamae should always make his or her best sushi, but the greater part of the vocation, for Sam, is hospitality: the comfort of his guests who breathe life into all his best-laid plans.
Unseen, the itamae writes concisely on his deliberately chosen medium, transcribing thoughts into reality. He had, of course, wanted to make the occasion a success: not 101 per cent, not 99 per cent, but 100 per cent. The guests at the night’s two seatings roared their approval as Sam and his team hit the mark. Gratifyingly, Kuheiji too asked if they could continue their collaboration next year.
The finest seafood had been procured for the mission, so your vegetarian correspondent had just the drinks. The overall impression of the sake was of a cool, clear, deep, subtle sweetness. Sake connoisseurs already know this: the drink’s sensitivity to temperature variation means it should be enjoyed as soon as it is served.
The different sake that night materialised on cue: each surely has its own optimal serving temperature, more so than fine wine. But unlike wines that evolve in the glass, sake does not hold their structure for long, as their soft, enveloping middle notes of grain soon began to predominate. The wines, by comparison, had a wider range of top notes, which they held and expressed with relatively greater verve and subtlety, and tasted more ‘transparent’ as result.
Maybe, as with the ear, human voice, and the tonal range of music, it is the middle and lower middle notes of sake that the palate has evolved to be more attuned to, where the nourishing richness of their transformed complex carbohydrates and potential complexity from long ageing might be found. To this palate anyway, the night’s sake were transitions of two material states, varieties of a kind of food-drink that probably show best when artfully paired with dishes that complement and unravel their taste profiles.
Still, there was one sake among the starring cast that was so close to being complete in itself that it seemed to need no such marriage. Its finesse may even be better appreciated without any food pairing (‘sushitarians’ may demur).
Kamoshibito Kuheiji HInoKISHI 2020 Junmai Daiginjo presents crisp notes of fresh immaculate fruit, flowers, evanescent miso-butter cream, and essence of sea breeze. They appear coruscatingly and pique your interest, linked together like the facets of a cut diamond. More conventionally described, there is poise, balance, and proportionality in its attack and development on the palate, and a clean, elegant finish with a hint of pure sesame oil and perfectly cooked tempura batter.
For the foodie, HInoKISHI vintage 2020 was paired with tossaki, a cut of bluefin tuna from the base of the head, and uni. For posterity, the sake is recorded as being made from the Yamada Nishiki rice variety grown in the Monryu area of Kurodasho, in soil of montmorillonite clay that includes limestone, magnesium, and potassium. It draws water from the mountains and is open to the sun to the east and the west, where wide diurnal temperatures define a circadian rhythm of rest and growth. Typically, a 990 sq m rice field in Monryu yields just 270 bottles of Kuheiji’s finest.
HInoKISHI was both the night’s headline and opening act; Kuheiji clearly doesn’t believe in saving his best for last but, remarkably, what he and Sam chose to follow it was the stuff of surprise and delight too. Domaine Kuheiji Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Noirs Brut is the Burgundian equivalent of a 100 per cent pinot noir champagne, as light as air with a near-diaphanous perlage of nano bubble beads. It suggests a pristine forest stream meandering over smooth, clean rocks, yet is rich and satisfying. In this purity, it shares a family resemblance with HInoKISHI.
Without wanting to give them a short shrift, we’ll say the other wines exhibited the same, with extreme levels of tidiness seemingly taken in their making. The constant-voltage Bourgogne Chardonnay 2020 did not let slip one baby hair throughout dinner, while the Savigny Les Beaune 1er Aux Clous 2019 is a precocious gift from an unheralded appellation.
A parting shot on ‘alcoholic drinks’. Sake and wine are ultimately products of fermented sugars, but their organoleptic qualities are subtly yet tangibly different in the way they move the senses when you taste them, and in how they leave you feeling long after.
Human, not microbial, culture assigns different aesthetic value systems to judge those qualities, seeing them as virtues or flaws of character. For one, while rice husks are seen as impurities for junmai sake, grape skins are an essential element in most fine wines for ‘complexity’ and ‘persistence’. Except for red burgundy: pinot noir is the sensitive one whose thinness of skin almost unseparates it from the rest of the world, like an unhusked grain of rice.
Kuheiji has written of the tacit reformation of traditional culture in the 21st century to make sake that expresses its time and place, but that still draws on the refinement of generations of evolution and collective knowledge. Cleaving to tradition, the accumulation of current best practices, one might understand all that has been done to achieve a point of culmination.
Does one rely on tradition or the ingredient? It might depend on what each is needed for and, for Kuheiji, it seems to be to find the limits of deliciousness. Neither is an end in itself, but a way of discovering our source of the delicious unknown: soil.
The upcoming Echo In The Night series will feature an anniversary special celebrating six remarkable years with Sushi Hibiki. From 31 August to 8 September, anticipate eight renowned chefs from around the world join in on the exclusive edition. Each seating is priced at RM1680+ per person and is limited to just 18 seats per session. But on 31 August and 5 to 8 September, two sessions will be available each day at 6pm and 8.30pm. On 1 September, an afternoon session will be held at 2pm and 6pm. For reservations, click here.
Photography: Law Soo Phye
