Whipped Cream Difficulties

That’s the NYT‘s description of sake: “passionately adored by a small cadre of loyalists, but relegated to the category of ‘mysterious obscurity’ among the masses.”

In spite of this unfortunate metaphor, the actual article, about Japanese restaurants in Las Vegas that serve very high end sake, contains some interesting bits. For example, there’s Frozen Beauty sake, aged for 12 years in cold storage and selling for a mere $2,388 per (720 ml) bottle.

The tale of Watari Bune, meanwhile, seems like something out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The sake is created from a rare strain of rice that is so vulnerable to the nibbling of insects and the pummeling of typhoons that it had nearly lapsed into extinction in Japan. But in the 1980s Takaaki Yamauchi, from a brewery called Huchu Homare, met an old farmer who wistfully told him that the lost rice used to make sake of unsurpassed deliciousness.

A hunt began. In 1989, Mr. Yamauchi managed to acquire 14 grams of Watari Bune seedlings that the Japanese ministry of agriculture had freeze-dried and stored in a gene bank. He planted the seeds, grew the rice and brewed what we might think of as a drinkable time capsule. Thanks to Mr. Sidel and his team, it can now be found around New York at restaurants like Sakagura and Robataya, where it costs $160.

And let us not overlook Divine Droplets, “made by hanging canvas bags of fermenting mash in a handmade ice dome, during the frigid winter in the Hokkaido Prefecture, and patiently letting the sake filter out in a slow, pure drip.” That’s a mere $72 a bottle. (I am assuming that all of these bottles are 720 ml, but I’m not sure; the NYT annoyingly doesn’t specify.)