A SAKE NIGHT

KOKO’S
CROWN CASINO
MELBOURNE

A few years ago I was in Kyoto in Japan doing research on a new novel.

Stayed in a traditional Japanese guesthouse. The wooden bathtub. The rice paper walls. The bedroom with tatami matting and the futon rolled out nightly by a kimono-clad geisha.

And I drank a bit of sake. Mainly because the French “vin ordinaire” was so ordinary and so expensive. It was like paying fifty bucks for a bottle of paint thinners!

Sake was something I had discovered in huge bottles years earlier in Kaua’i in Hawaii. And I had learned to drink it cold.

Recently I had another sake culture shock when instructed to drink it out of a wine glass! What about all those cute little tumblers and clever bottles? What happened to the housewarming packs?

It was a seminal moment. And it worked.

The night – for God’s Sake-- was a dinner exploration of a seventeen hundred-year-old Asian drinking tradition. They have been making this rice wine for the Imperial Court in Japan since at least 300 AD.

(Only last week, coincidentally, I read that the sake tradition was in trouble because young Japanese trendoids are suddenly preferring shots of bourbon and Coke or Lemon Ruskies. Hundreds of sake producers have gone out of business. They are now praying for foreign business.)

On a big sake night at Koko’s at Crown Casino recently we tried to turn back time. It worked for me.

And, at a time when I thought I was “turning Japanese I really think so”

(as the song says) I discovered beautiful, pungent, sake made right here in Australia.

We are not only selling rice to the Japanese now. We are fermenting it. Turning it into classy booze like Go-Shu Junmai. And selling it to them for businessmen to get plastered on in Karaoke bars and nightclubs.

Sake -- or Nihonshu as it is called Japan – is a surprisingly complex drink. The experts give it as much respect as white wine and claim it can have more than 400 distinct aromas and flavours.

Those flavours are determined by the koji (the mould that breaks starch into sugars) and the soil in which the rice is grown. And to what degree the makers polish the rice. The more they polish the rice the better the grade of sake. On the top shelf the grain has been polished to such a degree there is less than fifty per cent left.

This produces what they call Junmai Daiginjo-Shu. There is more. But I think I left the homework in a glass somewhere.

Anyway, over a meal of stylish morsels at Koko’s -- one of the classiest locations of any restaurant in Australia – we tried all sorts of local and Japanese sake.

On the food side we ate ocean trout tataki and Moreton Bay bugs. Then Tempura scampi “dusted” (their word) with curry-spiced salt. That was yummy!

Then came some rare lamb slices and the expected delicious miso soup and clever ice cream.

The big surprise! A sparkling Tsunami Sake. First time for me. Loved it. You can put bubbles in rice wine???

But going over some stained notes I have two sake recommendations:

My dinner partner absolutely loved the Go-Shu Blue offering which is a top shelf Australian sake.

My personal favourite – the Tamon Hiraki from Kyoto, Japan.

The tasting notes say it is “ soft, sweet and feminine”. I can wear that.

Just makes me think of that research in Kyoto and getting on with finishing the book.