The downside of writing for a newspaper is often the word count. I had so much else to say about sake in Montreal that I could have written another entire article! But that’s why writing gods invented blogs. So this is everything else I wanted to include, summarized below:
I wanted to start the article with a delayed lede by putting the reader inside one of my phone interviews, like this:
I love sake!” yells Yuri Charlotte Koshiyama-Chia’s taxi driver in the background of our phone interview. Koshiyama-Chia is the front-of-house manager of Old Port restaurant Hanzo, which sells a selection of premium sakes by the glass, bottle, shot and in cocktails to a growing number of lovers of Japan’s national drink of fermented (not distilled) rice – a group that seems to include her taxi driver – thanks in part to a recent a trade deal, a spike in Japanese restaurants in the city, increased support from the SAQ and more sake importers in Quebec.
Cute, right? Had to axe it.
Sake vs Shochu
I also had to cut a little anecdote about Koshiyama-Chia’s family’s drinking preferences:
Koshiyama-Chia’s family mostly drank shochu (distilled rice or barley alcohol; sake is fermented) at home in Shimanto-shi, Japan, but they’d break out fancy, gold-labelled bottles for celebrations. “We don’t get them in Montreal,” she says. Montrealers don’t have the same history with sake as Japan, and thanks to heretofore little demand, the SAQ hasn’t made them a priority, meaning selection is small.
Where to Drink Sake on Sunday in Montreal
I also wanted to shout out to Le Blossom’s half price bottles nights every Sunday, where I’ve been a regular for the past year:
But now, more restaurants including Jatoba, Hanzo and Imadake, to name just a few, offer wider selections of sakes meant for sipping and enjoying
like wine, either on their own or paired with food, whether that’s Japanese ramen or curry or very French duck confit. Le Blossom offers half price bottles on Sundays and Marusan hosts “Sake and Vinyl” nights where local sake importers wind their way through the Old Port restaurant offering tastes of something new.
Inside the SAQ
I also reached out to the SAQ to find out who the replacement category manager would be now that the helpful one that Vivian Hatherell of Metropolitan Wines and Sakes mentions has left. I wanted to know if they’d continue to encourage growth in this category. But the SAQ didn’t get back to me. Now I’ve found out that the SAQ is planning a couple specialty stores like those in Ontario (the LCBO in Ontario has two East Asian boutiques. In Quebec, some stores can access specialty products, but not on a consistent basis. “They’ll buy like ten cases at a time, whereas we could go through 200 cases at those two Ontario stores in a year alone,” said Hatherell). Exciting news, but it could take awhile since the shelf could be pretty bare. Orders aren’t large or consistent enough to steadily stock much counter space, I feel. Not yet, anyway.
Another point I had to cut was the inner workings of the SAQ and what happens if import agencies don’t sell everything that order and have stored in SAQ warehouses:
One of those constraints is the stipulation that importers must sell their stock before a storage deadline, says Sébastien Langlois of wine and sake importer Bacchus76. The SAQ wants products out of its warehouses so new ones can arrive, so if a company can’t sell its order within 210 days, the SAQ seizes the product and disposes of it as it wishes. The agency also loses its deposit and is demoted to a more expensive category, where it has to fund a higher percentage of an order. It takes years to move up in category but only one strike to move down. “When you start, you’re by default “C” and you have to fund 100 per cent of your orders. In category “A” you fund only 40 percent. So for us being retrograded would be a catastrophe. It would mean not being able to supply our customers and not being able to keep ordering from all our producers at a good level,” he says.
Beating the deadline is fairly easy for wines, but not sakes. “We have over a
thousand wine clients, so the odds of finding a buyer for any wines are high. For sakes, we have maybe 50 clients at the moment,” he says.
Trade Agreements, Specifically the CPTPP
I had to cut a big section about how a recent trade agreement with Japan has increased availability of Japanese products including sake:
Another reason for the recent sake boom in Montreal according to Koshiyama- Chia is the decreased price of many importing a number of Japanese goods including sake, thanks to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ratified between Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore on December 30, 2018. “There was always an interest in Japanese products, but the price was never accessible because of import fees and taxes,” she says. Since the agreement, she’s already seeing an effect on the price of both sake and Japanese ingredients used at Hanzo.
I also learned a bit more about this last night at the Consul General of Japan in Montreal’s sake reception. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more surprised by a response to my writing than when Mr. Osamu Izawa quoted part of my article in his welcome speech to the brewers, trade representatives and import agents who attended the reception in his gorgeous Westmount home. He even demonstrated how to make sukiyaki with imported Japanese Wagyu beef and had his personal chef hand-make nigiri for guests. Thanks to a direct line to Tsukiji Market (not literally, but the man does a pretty great hook-up), the tuna, mackerel and what I think was sea bream were incredible. See video here.
Natural Sake
And I had to cut a bit about “Natural Sake,” whicih is similar to the natural wine movement I’m writing about in a few weeks for the Gazette:
Leaders in “natural sake” include Terada Honke, whose sake is imported by
Ward & Associés in Montreal got the attention of the head sommelier at Noma and is now found as a pairing on Japanese and non-Japanese tasting menus around the world. Natural sakes have also started appearing at natural wine fairs, including RAW, which is coming back to Montreal in October.
And some fun facts:
Bottles keep longer, so more places should be selling by the glass:
With higher alcohol levels, open bottles of sake keep a bit longer than wine anyway, meaning restaurants can buy cost effective 1.8 L bottles of sake with less fear of waste than they would magnums of wine.
Hot or cold?
“There’s a huge myth about drinking hot sake,” says Koshiyama-Chia. “Some people think it’s cheap sake.” But Koshiyama-Chia recommends her most popular fall and winter high-end sake, Everlasting Roots, served slightly warmer than room temperature. “You can have more of the subtle aromas,” she says. She also says her Old Port clientele is often more educated about sake than you might expect, but plenty still
come to Hanzo for sake bombs and sake cocktails, and there’s nothing wrong with that. “People have this idea about sake that it’s super strong, like a 40 per cent type of drink,” says Nadeau. “But we have premium, gastronomic sake and people are responding to that. We love first timers, because you open a good bottle and stop thinking that way.”
Dreams for the future
Both Marc-André Nadeau (of Jatoba) and Hideyuki Imaizumi (Marusan’s owner) would like to see quality sake become a drink to be enjoyed not just with foods other than Japanese food in Montreal, which as is slowly happening thanks to at places including Mon Lapin and Pastel. “I’d love to
go to L’Express and order the veal kidneys with mustard sauce and have those with a super rice-y honjozo,” says Nadeau.
Koshiyama-Chia and Langlois would like to see a sake bar open. “Like izakayas in Japan with those giant magnums, but just on tap,” says Koshiyama-Chia. “If I opened my own place, it’d be like that,” she says. “We just need people who are curious and interested in sake to get there. We need to get the word out. Sick marketing. Make it cool.”
Kampai Montreal 2019 happens today! It takes place at the Marché Bonsecours from 5:30-8:30pm. Tickets come with tasting coupons and a glass. They’re not cheap, but are definitely worth it if you’re interested in amazing sake!
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