Interview: Sarah Stewart

Sarah Stewart judging at the International Wine Challenge (IWC) sake division in London.

Q: When sake is served three times at a tea gathering, is it the same sake each time?

Sarah: It’s up to the host–traditionally you would serve the same sake three times but as everything is done with consideration for the guests, if you know you have guests who love sake coming you would probably choose to serve two sake and introduce the second one at a point in the gathering where people are having the main meal, and then at the most formal point of the gathering we circle back to the first sake. So usually the first sake is the one that you want to have the most impact, and the second one can be an accessory, something more fun or playful.

But we have to be careful about balance, we put a lot of effort into choosing everything but we don’t want to overshadow the service of the tea when that happens later on by having an overly fancy meal or an overly opulent sake. Everything should be in balance and there to support the focus of the gathering.

You pour and serve sake for each other and drink sake from the same cup, which has strong cultural significance in Japan. The greatest honour you can do another person is asking to borrow their cup and drink from it.

After an intensive year in Kyoto focused on aspects like tea gatherings, I wanted to further advance my tea studies after moving to London. I saw the WSET course and thought that would be a nice opportunity to know more about sake so I can take better care of my guests in the tea room and choose sake that would be particularly meaningful for them.

So, I took the course and it changed my life completely, sent things in a different direction–in a great way–opening a world that I didn’t know existed because I had only been drinking sake in the traditional way, out of sakazuki, the flat, shallow cups because that’s how we enjoy it in the tea room. And when I had it in a wine glass and was exposed to all those extra aromas and flavours it just blew my mind. I had the mother teacher of all of us, Natsuki Kikuya, one of our UK Sake Samurai, who helped to create the WSET Level 3 programme. The thing that struck me most during the class was how amazing she was at tasting, seeing her notes, how she made what was in the glass come alive.

I’m very grateful to her for imparting her excellent tasting skills and it certainly helped me in the exam! I’d been studying wine for a few years before that, and felt that sake combined everything I loved about wine with everything I loved about traditional Japanese arts, those cultural traditions. So it became the hobby that took over my life! And now I am a WSET sake educator, I’m the membership office for the British Sake Association, a non-profit that helps to promote sake here in the UK, I judge sake for the International Wine Challenge, and I’ve taken most of the sake qualifications that exist out there.

The qualification I ended up being most interested in was Sake Scholar, a regionality course developed by Michael Tremblay that goes through all 47 prefectures. You need to have WSET or Kikizake-shi first to give you a foundation, to know how sake is made and how to taste and appreciate it. This course delves into all the things all of us are fascinated by–why does the sake from Niigata taste so different from Nagano, even though they’re right next to each other? Sake Scholar has the time and the bandwidth to dive into all of those regionality differences, geography, river, mountains, rice, yeast. It’s my dream class to take, and now to be able to teach.

Q: How did you get to be an IWC judge? What has that been like, and what changes have you seen?

Sarah: I came into IWC in 2019, which takes us back to taking WSET Level 3 in Sake and how that literally changed my life and put me on a new career course. I was humbled to receive the award for the top exam score that year, and as part of that you get to go to a lovely ceremony at the Guildhall in London and there’s a nice award presentation, and you get an invitation to judge at the International Wine Challenge the following year. I entered then for the first time and happily they’ve kept me around since! I was with the London team through the covid years, when unfortunately a lot of the international judges couldn’t make it, and things were done very differently during that time.

What was really impressive was that despite all the changes and the challenges–normally you have five or six people on a panel, switching panels every day to interact with different people, during covid we had small panels of three people only and that didn’t change for the three days–the overall proportion of sake that received medals, those percentages stayed fairly constant. That spoke to the strength of the judging method and how the core of IWC is really coming to a consensus. Everyone has their opinion but we have to discuss and come to an agreement. If there’s a sake you feel really passionate about you can try to convince your colleagues to see its merits, and that teamwork approach means every sake is given a chance, somebody can speak up for it. That’s something I really like about the IWC judging, as opposed to some other competitions where you’re judging individually, just writing your notes, then it’s all added up. So overall I think being part of IWC has really helped me improve my tasting and evaluation for sake.

It also reminds you that there are a lot of types of sake out there that are wonderful but aren’t necessarily at their best in a competition setting, where you might be having a flight of 50 really big, bold junmai daiginjo. The organisers do their very best to flight the sake appropriately, so we have more subtle sake together. But certain sake do better with food, or do better warmed, in a different setting. And that’s one of the really great things about getting to explore unusual styles in Sake Scholar, where we’re delving into different regions and different things. It gives you the opportunity to highlight some of those sake that are wonderful but might not perform as well in a competition setting. You find a setting where you can show them at their best.

Q: Have you seen much change since 2019?

Sarah: We’ve seen continued growth in the number of submissions most years, and changes in the type of sake being submitted. One of the cool things about IWC is that it is very reflective of the trends happening in Japan. For example, 4-MMP, that compound that smells a little bit like gooseberries, green herbaceous things–or at a more extreme level, like cat urine–for wine, it’s the characteristic aroma of sauvignon blanc. It’s a pyrazine, and it’s become a thing in some modern styles of sake. And it went from almost never seeing it to suddenly having it show up in 10% of the sake we were looking at in certain flights. So even if you don’t live in Japan and only go there for a few weeks a year, as is the case for many of us based overseas, it’s worth keeping up with trends, with what’s happening in Japan. We have also seen some categories change in popularity, the number of sparkling sake submissions go up every year and the quality goes up exponentially every year. That’s makes it one of my favourite categories to explore and see what the brewers will come up with next as they’re going from strength to strength.

For aged sake, we’ve seen an increase in the last year or two of sake aged at cold temperatures, so we’re not picking up those oxidative notes, dark colour, sugars, big dried nuts and fruit. Instead it’s more subtle and elegant, like cashew milk and white chocolate, fun things, a whole new family or aromas that didn’t really exist commonly in sake before. And you can’t really judge those on the same footing so we’ve separated them out and now there’s a koshu category for the traditional, oxidative, ambient temperature aged sake, and an aged category for ones that might stay at -5°C for 10 years.

Q: How did you go from being a student on the Sake Scholar course to co-teaching it with Michael?

Sarah: It was auspicious happenstance, I guess. When I first started at IWC Michael was a judge there and he is also Canadian and just an awesome friendly guy, he took pity on me as a wide-eyed newbie on the first day. We were chatting at lunch and he told me about this new course on regionality that he was creating. I told him it sounded amazing and I’d love to take it when it launches. It launched in Toronto, then ran in Brooklyn, then it was covid and it had to run online for a few years. I really wanted to take the course with him in person, as tasting together and networking is so much more fun. So once we started to come out of covid I reached out to him and asked when he would be running the course again in person, anywhere in the world. And he said that actually he’d love to run it in London as he’s there every year for IWC but couldn’t find a venue to host it.

I teach sake and wine at the West London Wine School, a full-service wine school owned by Jimmy Smith of “Wine with Jimmy” YouTube fame. The school is super supportive of the sake programme and willing to provide a home for new qualifications so when I approached them about Michael teaching there they were extremely enthusiastic and we set it up for the first time. I worked as his admin assistant, ordering all the sake and handling logistics. And as we were working on that course Michael said that his goal was not to be the only Sake Scholar instructor, the course is bigger than him and he’s a very busy guy, always taking on new projects. So he doesn’t have the time to travel in person to all the places in the world that want to run this course, and he intended from the very start that Sake Scholar would become a program provider, like WSET or Wine Scholar Guild, where qualified instructors approved by Michael could teach the course in their local market according to his specifications.

So he approached me about this idea and of course I was incredibly excited at the prospect, and after lots of discussion I became the first educator that he onboarded, shortly followed by Elliot Faber in Hong Kong, and there are a few new people who will hopefully be coming on board in the near future. And I think it’s great because it ensures that the programme will only continue to grow. There will be an online option available, which will be good for people who struggle to travel long distances for a few days. A lot of people who’ve done the course have really enjoyed the in-person aspect of it, where you can delve into conversation, debates, discussions about these regionality concepts which can be fun and sometimes controversial–does terroir exist in sake? You also get this great group of people that you’ve spent three days with and now you have a network of sake people to refer back to. Both times we’ve run the course in London, we’ve had people coming from all over Europe, even from North America, and those people have stayed in touch and are able to reach out to each other when they need help with different markets.

And this alumni network is something we’re trying to continue to grow with the upcoming alumni trips to Japan, the first one is coming up in just a few weeks, going for seven days along the old Nakasendo trail, starting in Kyoto and ending in Yamanashi, visiting about seven breweries during that time. For any of us who are into sake and going to Japan, you want to have that insider access brewery tour, to be talking to the people who are making the sake, getting all those geeky technical details. Some breweries are quite difficult to get access to, but thanks to Michael’s name and Sake Scholar’s reputation we’ve been able to negotiate access to some breweries that are normally closed to visitors, such as Kuheiji. This gives alumni the access that turns this into a true study trip, plus the opportunity to further network with fellow Sake Scholars from all over the world. The first trip sold out in about six hours, so Michael and his local tour guide partner in Japan will definitely be running more in different areas of Japan. And the only way to get on the trip is to have taken Sake Scholar, another reason to do the course.

We get a lot of requests for the Sake Scholar textbook, which is 400-plus pages and 5 lbs of every minutiae of sake regionality, and the only way to get that book is to take the course. So signing up gives to access to lots of useful resources.

Q: You work not only with sake, but also wine, tea, cheese and more – how do you see these areas interacting?

Sarah: The thing that originally brought me into wine was food pairing. So I’m less interested in drinking things on their own and more fascinated by the alchemy when you bring food and beverage together. That’s what got me into wine and made me strongly interested in sake. And if we’re communicating the wonders of sake to people who are new to it, food seems to me like a really strong bridge for doing that. Sake and food go so well together and it’s very hard to create unpleasant combinations by accident the way you can with wine. I’ve used cheese as a vehicle for doing that, everyone in the UK loves cheese, pairing cheese with alcohol is a very accepted tradition here. And pairing a sake and cheese is a very effective way to reset the idea that you have to pair sake with Japanese or Asian food. It goes with everything, even cheese.

Another thing I love about Sake Scholar is that there’s a section on regional foods for every prefecture. And it’s important when you’re thinking about how did that sake style evolve, looking at some of those old, historic dishes can tell us a lot. It’s one of the strongest arguments you can make for regionality in some places, doesn’t work for all of them. You have somewhere like Nagano, land-locked, up in the mountains without much fresh seafood, relying on a lot of preserved foods, miso, fermented vegetables. These have powerful flavours so it makes sense that Nagano has developed a style of sake that tends to be more rich, robust, savoury and umami-forward than prefectures on the coast that historically have been eating a lot of fresh seafood–for that you want something clean and light that stays in the background and quietly complements. So for me, using the interaction between food and sake helps to bring new people into sake but also to deepen the understanding of many sommeliers and people in the wine and sake trade interested in taking this course. Knowing the food tradition of each place can give somms and chefs inspiration for how to pair the sake in their own menus.

Q: What are your favourite places to enjoy and explore sake, in Japan or elsewhere?

Sarah: Any time I go to a new place, I love finding the local sake bar or local restaurant with a great sake list. I always want to find something new rather than going to the same places. I want to try wherever is new and interesting because that’s where I find new experiences, someone else’s interpretation of sake. How are they presenting it? How are they explaining it to their guests? I often learn a lot from that, find things I can integrate into a future class or use to convince someone.

In Japan, my best advice is get out of Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, get off the beaten track. Some areas of Japan suffer from over-tourism but as soon as you get out there are no tourists. In the last year and a half I’ve been through Fukui Prefecture, Shimane Prefecture, Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture, up in Yamanashi–I hardly saw another foreigner or westerner, didn’t have any issues getting into the sake bars and restaurants that I wanted to go to and had an amazing experience. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, you’ll be fine with translation and map apps. So I tell people to take a chance, get out of the main prefectures and find something new. That’s my recommendation rather than a specific place.

Q: What are you excited about in the sake world at the moment?

Sarah: Like many other people, I’m really encouraged by the recent UNESCO intangible cultural heritage recognition for koji-based alcohol. I think it’s been proudly announced at every major event that I’ve gone to since it happened. It functions as a platform to instantly communicate how significant sake is, and I hope it will open more doors and result in sake being more widely accepted in more places. We constantly seem to be in the situation where everyone says “this year will be the one for sake!” so I hope this will help it break through.

I can’t reveal all of Michael’s secrets yet, but we have some very exciting developments coming up for the whole Sake Scholar curriculum, new courses that people can take, you can be first to find out about those by signing up to the mailing list from the website or following me, Michael or the other instructors on social media. Sake Scholar is an amazing qualification but it’s a big hurdle for a lot of people. I always get a laugh out of seeing people posting about taking Sake Scholar and the intimidating textbook. So we’re looking at other ways to make exploring Japan’s sake regionality more accessible, even to people who don’t know as much about sake. I’m really excited about that because although many of us are sake geeks who love nerding out about things, there are lots of people who would love to know more about sake but aren’t interested in taking a qualification. There are other ways to get those people on board without the stress of an exam.

Q: Anything else you want to add?

Sarah: The next Sake Scholar course in London is 10-12 May 2025, some very exciting people from Europe have already signed up so it will be a great networking opportunity. We’ll probably run the course every spring in future, with smaller runs if there’s demand. If you’re interested but only at a different time of year or in a different place, feel free to reach out to us and we can talk. We’re also happy to help with travel and logistics for the London course, finding accommodation. London can be expensive so that can add quite a bit to the cost of the course, but the wine school is not in the city centre so there are reasonably priced places to stay just 10 or 15 minutes’ walk or a short bus ride away. Just contact me!

We could also put people who are willing to share accommodation in touch. There are also lots of chances to have fun and relax as we organise evenings in local sake bars or the Kanpai sake brewery. One advantage of the format of Sake Scholar is you don’t do the exam on day 3, you take it about 4–8 weeks later when you’ve had plenty of time to digest everything. So when you’re here you can focus on the networking, the classroom experience and the after-hours activities that make the in-person course so much fun.