Sake Tasting
If you’ve been reading us for a while, then you know that we are BIG brunch people. We needed to reign in our habits of eating out, but we like to eat well. A typical brunch for us is pancakes, eggs, and bacon. For the past two weekends, we’ve been going through this gourmet cured bacon that Jay brought us. DELICIOUS!
I would also like to report that our cast-iron skillet is fully seasoned and the eggs just slide off. No more messy yolks when plating. I like to leave my eggs sunny-side up, so if the eggs stick, the yolks sometime break.
This particular sunday, we had left overs of the bacon, our last two eggs, and some french toast from the day before. (With bread that I made earlier that week!) We needed to have a good foundation before we went to the sake tasting. I mean, I doubt that is something you want to experience on an empty stomach.
New York Vintners
21 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
NY Vintners is where my company held their holiday party… two years ago. It was a rowdy time of wine tasting and TONS of hor d’orves, and a beautiful space. Chef Christopher Meeker is great, preparing food in abundance and supplying a lot of character to match. They have this large mobile shop, where the back room can enlarge (push back the shelves) or shrink, with a state of the art kitchens! It’s pretty amazing and they hold free wine tastings and other paid food/alcohol tasting classes. They regularly hold a “Sake and the Mediterranean” tasting event, but this particular one was advertised as “Taste a $1,000 Bottle of Sake and Meet Mr. Jihei Isawa, VP of Katsuyama Brewery.” He was in NYC for his launch of Akatsuki brand sakes, and we got to taste three new labels.
Separate from those three glasses, we got a little history of sake brewing and tastes of different junmai, non-junmai, aged, some Oregon brand, and nigori-shu. It was generous and paired with various tapenades, couscous, some delicious fresh made crostinis. Some of our favorite mid-level sakes were the Tokubetsu Junmai (literally “special Junmai,” which means there were no additional alcohol added to create this) Yuki Kage sake and Katsuyama Genroku Aged Junmai, which was aged for 3 years into a beautiful brandy like color and taste, both of which we purchased.
I wasn’t so much of a fan of G Genshu Joy, an Oregon brand sake. It was all right, just lacked some mild flavor that I like in sake. The “Jokigen Junmai Ginjo,” which is a Ginko Junmai, using more polished grains of rice than the Yuki Kage, was delicious. And the “Momokawa Pearl Nigori Genshu,” is nice, if you like Nigori sake.
The three new labels from Katsuyama brewery, the “Modern Shudo” types, are “Katsuyama ‘Ken’ Junmai Ginjo,” “Katsuyama ‘Akatsuki’ Centrifuge Drip Junmai Daiginjo” and “Katsuyama ‘Gen’ Junmai Daiginjo Genroku.” The “Akatsuki,” yes you’ve read that right, uses a centrifuge to separate and filter the sake. It also uses 35% polished rice, which is apparently quite literally, unheard of. That is the $1,000 bottle of sake, my friends. It was delicious. Loved it, there is no question about it. The Gen, is also delicious, really resembling a desert sake. It was very delicate. Ken was airy and delicious as well, although at that point… the Akatsuki was main show stopper. It’s hard to compete with a $1,000 bottle of sake.
And the brewer was very sweet and spoke a few words, clearly passionate about what he did. The store people were telling us that originally he wanted to do the tasting with sake cocktails. And it freaked the store people out that you would do that with such premium sake. The thing is Japanese people love their sake with some water, some ice, and some sake-tinis. And after the tasting, we went up to him and thanked him… then he proceeded to give us glasses of mixed Akatsuki cocktails. (Just with soda and a twist.)
