Japanese Food and Wine

Serving Shizen Wine

As an aperitif or throughout the meal

   

Shizen wines are light, zesty and refreshing.  Designed to enhance traditional and unique Japanese flavors, they tone down offensive fishiness but highlight elegant tastes. Western food, especially seafood is frequently heavily salted and spiced or covered in thick creams sauces. This kind of preparation demands a wine with oak, lactic acid and some oxidation. But this same type of wine overpowers the delicacy of uncooked pure natural fish and vegetables.

For those reasons Shizen wine, when other wines or sake are served in a meal, can be served first both as a palate cleanser like champagne and as an anticipation for the courses to be served during the rest of the meal. On the other hand for a purely traditional Japanese meal when the emphasis is heavily on the cuisine, Shizen can be served throughout the meal and will enhance the courses without overpowering them.

Terroir and food

The concept of terroir surrounds itself around unique characteristics found within the earth that reflects in the flavors and aromas of a wine. This doesn’t just include the soil, but also the rain, the sun, the air, the animals and all of its surroundings. The terroir creates can produce earthy characters from the soil composition or minty characters from a nearby eucalyptus tree – A grape will not taste the same if it is grown in Europe as it would in the Americas.

In Japanese cuisine, chefs uses a wide variety of local produce that is affected by the terrior as well. It only made sense for us to use a Japanese grape, grown in Japan for Japanese cuisine.

When the project was started we first gave serious consideration to using popular European varietals such as Chardonnay or Cabernet. However, many new world regions such as Argentina and Australia have already shared success with Europe, so we decided to use something that was unique to Japan. Japanese cuisine has recently gained international success so we found this as a perfect opportunity to find a wine to accompany the cuisine. To harmonize with the millions of Japanese meals served throughout the world we needed to derive flavors and aromas that were unique to Japan. The only way to do that was to find a grape that was indigenous to Japan and had spent centuries acclimatizing itself to the local terroir.

Finding a unique Japanese grape varietal suitable for making wine (vitis vinefera) was somewhat of a challenge. Japan is famous for pioneering an array of delectable hybrid varietals, none of which can be used for international winemaking. Miraculously, DNA analysis at the University of California found that “Koshu” is vinifera and it has existed in Japan since the 8th century.

Temperature, glass, label and sales aids

The wine should be served chilled, between 11 and 12 degrees and in clear, ideally stemless glasses (such as Reidel's “O” range). It is excellent for wine-by-the-glass programs. The label design was contributed voluntarily by Hiroshi Senju, certainly one of the greatest living and most internationally recognized Japanese artists. We are happy to provide posters, pamphlets and stand up cards for in-store promotions.

Alcohol and purity of fruit

There is a popular misconception that the higher the alcohol level (and correspondingly the sugar level in the grapes), the better the wine. The truth is quite to the contrary. In fact, with global warming sugar levels are soaring so high, particularly in hot climate regions that ripe grapes make wines too alcoholic. On the other hand, if the vineyards are picked too early the phenolics are immature, resulting in unpleasant and bitter flavors.

A great feature of the Koshu grape is that it fully ripens with moderate sugar levels, making in possible to create a low-alcohol wine (10 to 11 degrees) that is both flavorsome and in perfect balance.

Balance with food

Conceptually speaking, Japanese food is categorically different from Western food. The origin of the use of wine in European culture was as a digestive aid for unsaturated fats. In other words, wine is physically necessary in a Western meal. However, Japanese food is both healthy and easily digestible and does not demand a beverage for balance.

For that reason we decide to make a wine that would highlight cuisine rather than a wine that would be marriage with food. The idea is like velvet to show off diamonds rather than striving to find a harmony with a product that is already balanced. As well we wanted to extract flavors from the grape that are unique to Japan derived purely from the terroir and thus assiduously strove for purity of fruit rather that added flavors and fragrances that come from barrels, malolactic fermentation or oxidization, all of which are basic important components of wine made to go with Occidental dishes.