Sake!?

Yes please. :slight_smile: Have a couple sake contacts you would most definitely enjoy meeting and also a few wines that need opening :wink:

BTW, the pop-up NOMA gig at the Mandarin Oriental is doing a choice of wine or sake pairings and a friend just did the sake one and said it was absolutely out of this world. They go away in a couple weeks buy the landscape has already been changed.

For our restaurant we typically have a wine pairing and sake pairing for the same 9 course meal. I find it much easier to pair the sake with food than the wine.

For me, cheese and chocolate are two things where the traditional wine parings don’t actually sing to me. As noted above the Kimoto and Yamahai style sake have higher amino acids and can be very food friendly. I like them with cheese, especially aged cheeses. Sake can also pair nicely with dark chocolate.

Just like I’m sure petroleum products are more complex than wine, as are chemically modified foods. I don’t think this enters into the conversation of sake at all.

Cow horn and hoping for Wagyu…

A quick search yields studies that contradict that statement anyway. I’m still waiting for a source on it. I suspect that it isn’t true.

Just so everyone knows what I’m talking about, an often-cited paper by Rapp and Mandery in 1986 describes hundreds of different compounds contributing to the aroma of wine, while this source http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bk-2012-1104.ch016 describes 54 compounds identified in a sample of sake, with only 23 above threshold. The former might be describing the total for all wines, I guess, but 23 seems extremely low compared to what’s in a single wine. I’ll look into it more when I have more time.