ROSEN: Rice is nice as sake

By Jennifer Rosen, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Originally published 03:00 p.m., May 13, 2008
Updated 06:13 p.m., May 13, 2008

Take one wine class and you're a snob. Devote years of study to the esoterica of the Japanese tea ceremony and you're spiritually enlightened. Why not borrow some of that Asian immunity? You can sip, savor, spit and be zen if your drink is sake.

Over 6,800 years old, sake, like wine, helped usher in modern civilization. Our ancestors quit their nomadic ways, settled down and invented the mortgage, all so they could cultivate rice and grapes.

Sake also is fermented, but unlike wine, it requires a good mountain spring. Water is a key ingredient, since there's not much liquid in a grain of rice.

Out of thousands of rice varieties, only a few make premium sake. The starch at the center of the grain is best. To get to it, you have to grind away the outer layers of fat and protein. The more you polish, the better the sake, but the extra work and lower yield push up the price.

Futsu, economy-grade sake, made from 90 percent unmilled grains, lacks subtlety and complexity. Grinding away 40 percent to 50 percent gives you Ginjo, a much more elegant drink. The highest quality is Daiginjo, made from tiny nuggets of the purest starch.

In Imperial times, the grains were chewed by maidens of the court, whose saliva converted the starch to sugar. This glop, when spit out, attracted airborne yeast and began to ferment. It was ready when the sugidama, a ball of woven green cedar boughs immersed in the brew, turned brown.

These days they wash, soak, steam and ferment the rice with water, then filter, pasteurize and age the sake for three months to a year.

The result is Junmai, or pure sake, with a full, rich body, high acidity and a restrained nose. Another version, Honjozo, is made by adding distilled alcohol to smooth and lighten up flavors and boost fragrance.

Sake looks a lot like white wine, with the same clarity and ranges of color. Back before filtering, it used to look more like a pina colada and had to be shaken up before drinking. You still can buy this style, called Nigori or Pearl. The extra solids add interesting flavors of pineapple, vanilla and licorice.

Another variation is the fresh, lively Nama. Unpasteurized and perishable, it must be refrigerated so it doesn't start refermenting and blow its cork.

You can serve sake in a wine glass, on the rocks in a tumbler or blended into infinite varieties of sakitini. As for tradition, there's a certain exotic charm to the Masu, a square cedar box originally used as a rice measure. But the smell and flavor of wood tend to overpower the delicate flavors of premium sake.

Ceramics are better, namely the tokkuri, a flask for warming and pouring, and ochoko or guinomi, cups small enough to encourage repeated pouring, an important bonding ritual which often accompanies a slow descent under the table. Whatever you do, avoid tejaku, the unpardonable sin of pouring for oneself.

Premium sake should be chilled, but it can also be delicious warm. Hot sake owes its bad rep to the practice of scalding bad plonk to mask the flavor. Try moderate heat instead, and a full-bodied, earthy sake.

Sakes range from delicate to robust and have enough nuances - things like flowers and honey, plum, fig and cantaloupe - to keep wine connoisseurs babbling. The important thing is balance, with nothing cloying, harsh or otherwise incongruous standing out. They go from bone dry to quite sweet, but unlike the secret scribbling on bottles of German riesling, sake labels make it easy to tell just how sweet, by way of positive and negative SMV numbers: -5 is sweeter than -2, for example, while +3 is drier than both.

Enjoy sake as an aperitif, with lighter fish dishes or as an antidote to capsaicin and wasabi - plus, of course, a shot of humility.

Jennifer Rosen On Wine appears the second Wednesday of the month. Jester@corkjester.com

Recommended sake

Junmai Daiginjo

* Chiyo No Sono Garden of Eternity $35

* Nanbu Bijin Ancient Pillars $37

* Tentaka Kuni Silent Stream $29

Junmai Ginjo

* Ama No To Heaven's Door $35

* Chiyo No Sono Sacred Power $35

* Nanbu Bijin Southern Beauty $37

* Rihaku Wandering Poet $32

* Fukucho Moon on the Water $38

* Sato No Homare Pride of the Village $45

* Tentaka Kuni Hawk in the Heavens $29

* Tatsuriki Bisui-Kosen $25

* Sake Hitosuji $26

Nigori

* Rihaku Nigori Dreamy Clouds $30

From Oregon

* SakeOne Moonstone Infused Sake in Coconut Lemongrass or Asian Pear flavors, each $11

* SakeOne Momokawa Ruby or Diamond, each $11

Superpremium

* Daishichi Myouka Rangyoku Heavenly Flower, around $50 a taste in restaurants

• June 16, 2008

  4:10 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  ngbrewer writes:

  The second Wednesday of the month was last week. Has the cork been popped on this column?