Seven pieces in, you have the vocabulary. What you also have is a set of assumptions carried over from wine, and some of them do not survive contact with sake.
These are the ten questions I am asked most often. I have put them in the order the sake goes through: field, tank, press, bottle, market.
1. Does the rice variety matter the way the grape does?
Less than you would expect. Rice is dry, so it travels — nothing ties a variety to the brewery that uses it. Yamada Nishiki is the famous one, and it is a real variety with real properties.
The comparison people reach for is Chardonnay. Chardonnay does what you tell it. A Chablis and a Napa Chardonnay share a variety and almost nothing else — the site differs, but so does the barrel, the malolactic, the lees, the temperature. The grape carries the decisions rather than overriding them. Sake rice behaves like that, only more so. It brings structure and the way it dissolves in the mash, but very little aroma. Most of what you smell in a ginjō came from the yeast. Which is why two sakes from the same rice, the same prefecture and the same year can smell nothing alike.
2. Is there terroir?
This is argued about properly, and I am not going to settle it. But the argument has a particular shape in sake.
Four things go into the tank: water, rice, kōji, yeast. Three of them travel, and we have just dealt with the rice.
Water can be corrected — breweries routinely adjust its mineral content. Kōji spores come from fewer than ten houses, one supplying them from Kyoto for over three hundred years. Yeast is mostly ordered in, in small glass ampoules.
The labelling rules make the point sharper. A place name may appear on a sake only if the sake was brewed entirely in that place. There is no requirement about where the rice was grown. The name marks a place of manufacture, not a place of origin.
So when a brewery answers a terroir question by talking about its water, the honest reply is that the water was adjustable, the rice arrived by lorry, and the mould came in a packet.
There are exceptions — a brewery growing its own kōji from the spores in its building, fermenting with the yeast already living on its walls, using rice from the fields around it and water it has left alone. They are rare. So the textbook position is also cautious. The WSET text does not use the word terroir for sake anywhere, and says the ingredients and expertise are all transportable — that there is no reason a sake from Hokkaido has to taste different from one from Kyūshū.
The ground is moving, though. Whether it has moved far enough is for you to decide.
3. Is there an appellation system?
There are geographical indications, and there is no hierarchy. That distinction is the answer.
Japan set up GIs in 1994 for wine and spirits and extended them to all alcohol in 2015. The first sake GI was Hakusan in 2005. There are now twenty-one more.
What Japan does not have is the EU's ladder — no regional tier feeding a village tier feeding a named site, no system where the smaller the name the higher the claim. Each GI is simply a protected name, and what it protects varies enormously.
At one end, Nihonshu itself is a geographical indication. The whole country is one appellation, which tells you the system was built to defend sake abroad before it was built to rank one valley against the next.
At the other end is Tone-Numata in Gunma, designated in 2021. Its production standard would be recognisable in Burgundy.
The rice must be one of three named varieties, harvested inside the area. The water must be drawn inside the area and may undergo no treatment beyond settling and filtration — the mineral adjustment everyone else is free to do is forbidden here. The yeast must be one of two Gunma strains, or a yeast the brewery has taken from its own building.
All three travelling ingredients, pinned down. Sake terroir is not a settled fact, but somebody has written it into law.
4. Is there organic or natural sake?
Organic is now defined. Japan extended organic certification to alcohol in October 2022, and since October 2025 you cannot print the word on a Japanese bottle without it. Certified sake has only recently been able to travel as organic: the agreement covering the EU took effect in May 2025, and the UK and US followed that October.
Natural is harder, in sake as in wine. There is no global definition, and even France does not quite have one — what it has is a private charter, Vin Méthode Nature, drawn up by a growers' syndicate and accepted by the French fraud office in early 2020, with the appellation authority watching it for at least three years before deciding whether it becomes law. It requires certified organic grapes, hand harvest, native yeasts, no additives, and no added sulphur before or during fermentation, with a second logo for wines finishing under 30 mg/L total.
Hold sake up against that and something odd happens. Every bottle in the category clears the sulphur clause, because Japanese law forbids adding sulphur dioxide to sake in the first place. That part of the definition cannot discriminate.
What is left is method: kimoto starters, wooden vats, no purchased yeast. Some breweries now build their whole range as a ladder from conventional up to whatever lives in the building.
5. Why is the alcohol so high?
This is the strangest thing I know about sake.
Sake ferments to somewhere between seventeen and twenty per cent before water is added back. The usual explanation is that sugar never accumulates: enzymes release it at roughly the rate the yeast consumes it, so the yeast is never swimming in it. That is true, but the yeast is different too.
Sake yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Interestingly, the national brewing institute puts it plainly: taxonomically the same budding yeast as baker's yeast, and the same species that ferments wine.
But sake strains carry a broken gene called RIM15, which sits upstream of the machinery that tells a yeast to stop. An ordinary yeast gives up at around eleven per cent alcohol. Disable that one gene and it keeps going to roughly seventeen. These mutations appear in sake yeasts and in no other.
Now the part that turns it around. You would assume sake yeast is tougher. It is not — against laboratory yeast it is markedly worse at surviving stress, and dies more readily. What it has lost is the response that would tell it to stop and protect itself.
It does not go further because it can take more. It goes further because it has stopped listening.
6. Why is it all so clear?
Freshly pressed sake is not colourless. It is faintly lemon-green, about the colour of olive oil, and the pigments come from the kōji mould. Most breweries remove them with activated charcoal.
So why take it out?
The practice began between 1911 and 1923. The national sake competition first ran in 1911, and in that period any trace of colour cost a sake marks. It reached the wider market later, with the water-white Niigata style of the late 1980s.
And the judges were not being arbitrary. Outside sweet and aged styles, gold or amber or brown really is usually a sign of something wrong — poor storage, oxidation, or iron.
Iron is the sharp one. The permitted level in brewing water is under a tenth of what is allowed in tap water. Kōji mould secretes a compound that binds iron and turns red-brown; iron-contaminated sake goes brown, deteriorates faster, and loses its ginjō aroma. One fault, three symptoms, and colour is the one you can see across a room.
So brewers who tell you a coloured sake is probably a spoiled sake are reading a real signal. An entire industry then went on reading it for decades after better storage had made it much less reliable.
The pendulum is swinging back. Charcoal takes good things along with the bad, and used heavily you can smell the carbon itself. Hence muroka, un-charcoal-fined, now a style in its own right.
One last thing, which connects to the last piece: charcoal fining slows the development of colour and aged aromas. Strip a sake for the judges and you have taken away some of its ability to age.
7. Are there sulfites?
No, and not by choice — Japanese law forbids adding sulphur dioxide to sake. It would not do much good anyway: SO₂ needs acidity to work, and sake has little. Sake is pasteurised instead, and Japan was doing that three hundred years before Pasteur described the principle in 1865.
8. Is there a vintage?
There is a brewing year, running from 1 July to 30 June, which the tax authority uses for its production surveys. Bottles labelled 2019BY are not rare, and have become less rare as aged sake found an audience. But that is an administrative year breweries adopted voluntarily. It is not in the labelling standard, and nothing governs how it is used.
The date that is governed is not a vintage.
Every bottle must carry a manufacturing date, defined as the time the sake was filled into the container and sealed for sale. It is the bottling date. A sake aged ten years in tank and bottled last March reads as last March.
So the only date Japanese law requires tells you when the bottle was packed. Not when the rice grew, not when it fermented, not when it was pressed. Some breweries add the pressing or shipping month voluntarily, precisely because the legal one answers a question nobody asked.
9. Can you guess the region blind?
Less reliably than with wine, and I would not bet money on it.
Regional style exists. But almost everything that makes a sake is portable, and the polishing, the fermentation temperature and the charcoal sit on top of it. The brewer usually wins.
10. Why do the prices never climb?
A first-growth Bordeaux from a good year costs several times what it did on release. Wine people take this for granted as something bottles simply do.
Sake does not, and the reason is not that the sake is worse.
In Japan, selling alcohol requires a licence, and the tax authority reads that broadly: dealing in alcohol means selling it repeatedly, and it explicitly does not matter whether you make a profit. Buying for yourself is fine. Giving a bottle away is fine. Keeping a cellar is fine. Selling bottles on, again and again, is not — even at cost.
Which removes the whole mechanism. The 1982 Bordeaux is not expensive because the château priced it that way in 1983. It is expensive because forty years of auctions and merchants discovered that price. Sake has almost none of that: no auction record, no price history, no secondary market to speak of.
So the number on a sake bottle stays close to the one the brewery set. The bottles are not cheap because they are ordinary. They are cheap because nothing exists to make them expensive.
The next step
That is eight pieces, and the end of the series.
If you have read this far and found it interesting, then a course is probably the right next thing — because everything above sits on top of a foundation, and Level 1 and Level 2 are where that foundation gets built properly, step by step.
WSET Sake Course
Level 1 Award in Sake is a single day in Amsterdam: six hours, eight sakes chosen to give you the skeleton of the whole category, and an internationally recognised certificate at the end.
Level 2 goes considerably further into how sake is made and how the styles differ.
More in this series
Aged Sake: Fault or Beauty?
Sake that has gone off and sake worth twenty years of waiting are chemically different — and one of the compounds involved is already sitting in your Jura glass.
Sake and Food: Where Wine Struggles
Pairing, from the other direction. Asparagus, eggs, seafood, mushrooms are hard to put a wine next to — and the reasons have almost nothing to do with sake.
Temperature and Glassware
A wine list sorts by colour before anything else. Sake has every colour on that list, and one more — and each one is telling you something about what was done after fermentation.
Sake Styles, the Wine Way
A wine list sorts by colour before anything else. Sake has every colour on that list, and one more — and each one is telling you something about what was done after fermentation.
