News

You've heard of fusion food? Make room for fusion booze.

The East-meets-West culinary movement that emerged back in the 1980s finally has a counterpart in wine. Its name is Oroya, a new Spanish white billed as the first beverage specifically created for sushi.

Popular in Europe and the United States since last year, it was recently launched in Ontario and could soon be rolled out to other provinces.

If you thought the Japanese specialty of vinegar-infused rice and seafood was meant to be enjoyed only with sake, beer or green tea, you are apparently not thinking outside the bento box. You are also not thinking like wine and spirits purveyors, who have noticed the explosive growth of Japanese cuisine here over the past decade and a half.

A spawn of Spanish company Freixenet, the world's largest producer of sparkling wine, Oroya is not just a deflated bubbly shrewdly repurposed to tap the trend.

It was the personal project of young Tokyo-born winemaker Yoko Sato, who joined Freixenet in 1999 after working in the wine service business in Japan. Her goal: to craft a beverage that would complement the complexity of sushi, and its notoriously problematic condiment trinity of salty soy sauce, sweet pickled ginger and pungent wasabi, the nose-blistering green paste made from Japanese horseradish.

Ms. Sato says the idea came from Swedish tourists who said they loved sushi and preferred not to drink sake or beer with their food.

"It's a very different way of making wine," Ms. Sato, 32, said in a phone interview from Sant Sadurní d'Anoia near Barcelona yesterday. "Normally you make a wine and find something to match with it."

Now, the company's goal is to get the wine into Japanese dining establishments, and the hands of urbane Westerners who see sushi as both healthful and a hallmark of cosmopolitan living.

There are about 10,000 Japanese restaurants in North America, a number that's growing by 8.5 per cent a year, according to a 2006 report by the Japanese ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries. And that doesn't include thousands of supermarkets and grab-and-go convenience stores offering prepackaged trays of sushi. Even a few gas-station snack counters have moved into the raw-fish business - in case you needed another reason to give up driving.

To drive home the sushi connection, Freixenet created an attractive, minimalist label dominated by two large kanji characters forming the Japanese word for sushi, underscored by a small red dot evoking the rising sun of the Japanese national flag. Lest non-Japanese consumers get confused, the phrase "Created for sushi" is printed in small letters across the top.

Ms. Sato says Oroya was launched in Europe two years ago with a production run of 10,000 bottles; annual sales have since climbed to 20 times that, or 200,000 bottles.

A blend of three grapes from the central Castilla-La Mancha region of Spain - airen, macabeo and muscat - the $14 wine is light (at just 11 per cent alcohol), crisp, fruit-forward and distinctively aromatic.

Ms. Sato said she and her colleagues, who would regularly set up a makeshift sushi bar in her lab, worked by process of elimination. Their biggest surprise was that the local white wines of Spain's northern appellations, such as verdello and albarino, were too lean and acidic and tasted bitter against the soy sauce.

How well does Oroya match? Very well, I'd say after setting up my own makeshift sushi-and-wine bar in the kitchen. But then I have never been a skeptic when it comes to pairing wine with Japanese food. A modicum of wine knowledge and, more importantly, a willingness to try offbeat or underappreciated white grapes are enough to cure anyone of the notion that beer is the best match for sushi.

But don't take my word for it. Take it from Yoshi Tome, owner of Sushi Ran, a popular Michelin-starred restaurant in Sausalito, Calif., that carries more than 200 wines including 20 available by the glass.

"When you drink too much beer your stomach is already full, you can't enjoy the food," he says. "All of a sudden you have a balloon sitting in your stomach."

Mr. Tome says beer accounts for just 10 per cent of his bar bill, with the rest split almost evenly between wine and sake, the delicately flavoured fermented-rice beverage. Most of his sakes are served cold too, just like white wine, not warm as in the case of the generally inferior stuff consumed in most other North American Japanese restaurants.

Given Sushi Ran's location just south of Napa Valley, many patrons instinctively order oak-aged chardonnays and cabernets, Mr. Tome says. But he likes to nudge them toward more suitable alternatives when he can. Among them: crisp sauvignon blanc, Austrian gruner veltliner and Alsatian whites based on riesling, gewurztraminer, pinot gris and pinot blanc.

"Those wines are so much better," he enthuses. "When people order them that makes me very happy."

The main culinary assets of all those wines are big fruit and aroma. They also have a good amount of mouth-cleansing acidity, which is paramount, Mr. Tome says.

The oily character of delicate raw fish and the slightly tart-sweet flavour of sticky sushi rice, which is infused with sugar, vinegar and salt, will make a pushover out of oaky chardonnays and full-bodied reds, the lumbering sumo wrestlers of the wine world.

Another good match for lighter sushi preparations is sparkling wine.

Peter Boyd, a consultant to several fine-dining restaurants in Toronto, including Scaramouche, recommends the particularly boisterous, fruity-grassy New Zealand style of sauvignon blanc.

"I think sushi is probably the single best use for New Zealand sauvignon blanc, with its vibrancy and laser beam of green fruit. It's got the power, it's got the acidity, and it's got the bloody-mindedness to handle the wasabi."

With saltier foods steeped in soy sauce, he'd choose a slightly sweet but crisp kabinett style of German riesling.

Even reds aren't a complete writeoff when it comes to some elements of Japanese cuisine, Mr. Tome says. When many of his wine-geek customers come in with their hearts set on a big cabernet or merlot, he offers to order the food for them, typically dishes involving soy sauce.

"Salty dishes will work with red wine," he says, noting that the higher tannins in red wine counterbalance the salt. "When you dip it into soy sauce, then you can take a red wine."

Oroya (the word is Spanish for a basket used to move goods from one side of a river to the other) may be the world's first drink designed from the ground up to be paired with sushi, but it's not the first attempt by the wine or spirits industry to hop aboard the sushi express.

Five years ago, Bonny Doon, a California producer known for irreverent labels such as Cardinal Zin and Le Cigare Volant, came out with new packaging for its Pacific Rim Riesling (blended from Washington state and German grapes) with decals of raw fish on the bottle to get the culinary point across.

Back in Spain, producers of the country's great fortified wine, sherry, have for years been touting the wonders of cold, dry sherry with sushi. Gonzalez Byass, maker of the iconic brand Tio Pepe, for example, created an advertisement for the TV show Hell's Kitchen that carried the message: "Sushi without Tio Pepe? A raw deal."

Not coincidentally, dry sherry, with its electric acidity and nutty overtones, also happens to be a classic match for ceviche, Spain's own specialty of raw, citrus-marinated fish.

Even spirit makers are hoping for a sushi payoff. Several years ago, I asked Maurice Hennessy, eighth-generation scion of the family that founded the famous French cognac house, about his strategy to revive slumping cognac sales. He urged me to try cognac with sushi.

bcrosariol@globeandmail.com