Yes, you can pair wine with sushi

Experts say wine not only pairs well with sushi, it surpasses sake and beer if done correctly. Here’s how to do it.

There’s a new trend popping up in the fine-dining world, and if you haven’t spotted it, you’re about to. That trend is pairing wine with sushi. Most people’s initial reactions are skepticism. Is it possible to pair something like wine with rice that contains vinegar? Sushi traditionally pairs well with sake or beer, but can wine achieve the same result if done correctly?

There are a lot of wine experts betting that wine not only pairs well with sushi, it actually surpasses sake and beer if done correctly. A cynic might say that this is a money grab from the wine industry to get their tentacles into a dining space that was previously untouched. But according to leading sommeliers and taste experts, the pairings work surprisingly well, and the wine world is exerting its influence upon Japanese cuisine in surprising ways.

Xander Soren is a former Apple executive who became interested in wine when he moved to northern California. As he tasted his way through the state, his tongue landed on California pinots, and he decided to make a small production of his own as a hobby back in 2012.

“I blind tasted like eight different wines from different vineyards all over California, from as far north as Anderson Valley in Mendocino and then as far south as Santa Barbara. And it's funny, two years in a row, I picked the exact same two vineyards, and they're both on the Central Coast. One of them is La Encantada, which is in the Santa Rita hills, very close to Santa Barbara. And the other was the opposite end of the Central Coast, closer to Monterey, and that one is Sierra Mar,” Soren says.

Soren began this journey as a hobby, but it grew into something bigger as he began to introduce his wine to Japanese chefs both in the US and in Japan and was getting such a strong reaction and positive feedback that he thought he could make his wine for the Japanese market as a pairing for sushi. In 2019, Soren, along with award-winning winemaker Shalini Sekhar, increased their production, and once the wines had been aged four years, began selling them exclusively in Japan at first.

“Every single thing that I learned about sushi with wine, I learned from a sushi chef in Japan. I'm not the trailblazer that’s bending the rules over there, the [Japanese chefs] are breaking the rules. And I saw that was happening, and wouldn't it be fun to be a part of that party,” he says.

You don’t need to take Soren’s word for it, as he obviously has a vested interest in his wine working well with Japanese cuisine. Take the sushi chefs’ words as his wine now in some of the top sushi spots and restaurants in the world like Sushi Saito, Sushi M, Park Hyatt Tokyo, but also SingleThread Farms, n/naka, and The Ritz-Carlton Fukuoka to name a few.

The wine/sake program at Sushi M in Tokyo is led by sommelier Yoshinobu Kimura who first started pairing sushi with wine when he worked in New York City back in 2007. “When I had tuna sushi with Volnay red, accidentally, I found that tuna sushi goes well with red wine, specifically, pinot noir,” he explains. The trained somm was the wine director at two Michelin-starred Narisawa but left to create an original concept of pairing wine with sushi (the M stands for the marriage of sushi and wine).

When posing the question around vinegar in sushi rice, Kimura San explains that, “normally, my style is not to change wines for pairing to suit specific sushi rice because Sushi M has one type of sushi rice. Actually, our sushi rice vinegar is blended with four different types of rice vinegar. One of them is red vinegar. From my point of view, red vinegar works better with wines than white vinegar. I found that sushi rice in red vinegar went well with red wines when I started Sushi M.”

But there’s also a lot more nuance. Kimura San explains that temperature is also a critical component when pairing wine with sushi. “Serving temperature is a critical point for the pairing with sushi. At Sushi M, we serve burgundy red to pair with tuna sushi. Most likely, the serving temperature of burgundy red is at 16℃ to 18℃ at French restaurants. But we serve burgundy red at 14℃ to 16℃ which is a few degrees Celsius lower to fit into the temperature of tuna.”

As for Soren’s wines specifically, Kimura San says that “from my point of view, Xander’s wines have an elegant acidity which enhances the flavor of sushi rice vinegar. If you keep Xander’s wine under around 14℃, it would work out with white fish and silver fish, especially salmon. By being controlled at a bit lower temperature, some extra bitterness coming out from the wines is surprisingly paired well with these types of sushi. Another example is tuna sushi. Summer tuna in Japan which tends to be lighter goes well with Xander Soren Pinot Noir Yuki Vineyard Sonoma Coast. On the other hand, winter tuna which grows nicely marbled is paired with Ludeon. If you pair three different cuts of tuna which are akami, chu-toro, and oh-toro with Xander’s wine, each cut will give you a different flavor and impression because of the different fat part and Xander’s wine. His wines lead you to enjoy a harmony and complexity with sushi. Of course, generally speaking, Xander’s wine fits into any Japanese cuisine.”

James Briscione is an extraordinary chef and a taste expert. He wrote the book, The Flavor Matrix: The Art and Science of Pairing Common Ingredients to Create Extraordinary Dishes, where he used big data to create amazing recipes. Briscione thinks the pairing of wine with sushi is exceptional, but you need to keep a number of things in mind. “I think, [this pairing] falls a little more out of the aroma category and more into the taste category. As far as the palate experience, some of the best pairings are high acidity or light effervescence, light bubbles. You know how ginger is served with sushi as a means to refresh the palate between bites so that the fattiness and the salt is kind of taken away so you get the full experience of the fish? I think a lot with the wine that's what's happening, it’s refreshing the palate with either acidity or effervescence, particularly in the lighter white wines.”

Konstantin Baum is one of only 279 Master Sommeliers in the world, has over 150k subscribers to his YouTube channel, and is one of the most popular wine teachers whose mission is to get people to taste and appreciate wine. When it comes to pairing wine with sushi, Baum thinks everyone should try it, but thinks that because, “many sushi types are quite delicate, it’s more difficult to match with wine… I’ve done quite a bit of pairing wine with sushi. I paired different wines from Krug with sushi and I think the most memorable combo was a rosé Krug with a smoked eel. The smoked eel had this slight sweetness to it, paired with an intense and concentrated rosé Champagne was just beautiful.”

In regard to how a wine might cleanse your palate, Baum both agrees and disagrees with Briscione’s take. “I think it's a little bit tricky. The acidity of a fresh white wine can be like the lemon wedge that you squeeze over fish, just breaking up the protein, maybe also the fattiness, and just making the whole meal a little bit more palatable. But acidity can also, especially when it comes to really fatty fish, like salmon or eel, this oiliness can make the acidity taste slightly bitter and weird. So, I wouldn't 100% say that the fattier the fish, the more acidity you want to put against it. I think there is this bell curve of tastes. A little bit more acidity can actually improve the taste to a certain point. But there's also a tipping point when it comes to acidity and fatty fish, where the acidity can become too much on the combination of acidity and fattiness. There’s a point where it can stop working and make the whole pairing go off.”

In Los Angeles, Sushi Note Omakase is running a real-time experiment—doing a full wine pairing with a 20-course sushi omakase. The expert behind the wines is sommelier Ian Lokey who subscribes to a few criteria when it comes to pairing these two together. “I match acid with acid, and I match sweet with sweet. But there’s basically five types of pairings. 1. Is a disaster. 2. The food is good, but the wine isn’t. 3. The wine is good, but the food isn’t. 4. Neutral. And 5. Paradise.”

The wine program at Sushi Note is fascinating as it involves everything from dry German riesling and pinot noir from New Zealand to Chardonnay from South Africa and syrah from France. Each wine is meticulously chosen to match a trio of fish that all seem to fall into this ‘paradise’ of pairing.

“The one response I get the most when I describe Sushi Note is the excitement at entering an entire new genre of food and wine. Higher end wine and wine pairings is still unheard of when it comes to sushi, so opening that whole subset of our dining culture to the wine community has incredible financial and creative potential… While I can’t think of any wine that would be ‘bitter’ with fish, some pairings obviously work better than others. The big thing is to not be boring,” says Lokey.

How to pair wine with sushi: tips

When pressing all of the somms and taste experts, there’s one consensus when it comes to wine and sushi, and that is that Champagne works best with everything.

But if you want to move beyond bubbles and try pairing sushi with wine at home, all the experts have some specific advice:

Konstantin Baum: “I would definitely not recommend carrying sushi with heavy bold red wines. If you want to be on the safe side, going for a light white wine is kind of the best option. If you don’t have a lot of flavor coming from the sushi, I wouldn’t use an intensely flavored wine. I would opt for a Muscadet or a light avarino or an un-oaked Chardonnay. Or you could go for Champagne. On the fattier, oilier, more bold flavored end with the fish I would recommend lighter reds like a pinot noir or cabernet franc from the Loire Valley or like a trollinger from Germany.”

Ian Lokey: “The richness of salmon needs a weightier wine. Preferably a Chardonnay that sees a bit of oak. While I usually prefer white Burgundy in my life, I find that a fresher, fruit forward California Chardonnay from the Central Coast works very well as long as the oak is in balance. As for fatty tuna, I find you can get heavier than you think. I’ve found great success with nebbiolo (specifically Barbaresco). The way it carries the flavors of the fish before having the classic tannin and fat combination is a real joy. Spanish mackerel soars with an Alsatian pinot blanc due to the texture of both wine and fish. There is a distinct oiliness to Spanish mackerel and matching that is key while also keeping sufficient acidity.”

Devin Davenport, sommelier at n/naka in Los Angeles: “I'd say just for a starting point, if you're doing lighter fish, like white fish maybe go with a lighter style like a Chablis or a dry riesling to go alongside. And I don't think you're gonna get any misses there. If you're leaning towards some richer fish, let's say salmon, and you're interested in drinking red wine, maybe pick something from a cooler climate that isn't, you know, cabernet sauvignon, stick to pinot noir, maybe even Beaujolais, conveying something like that.”