At the beginning of December 2024, sake became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A welcome spotlight for this Japanese rice-based alcoholic beverage, based on a manufacturing process established 500 years ago. While its appeal is growing in Europe, consumption has been steadily declining in Japan since the 1970s. The disenchantment of Japanese youth with this ancestral beverage even seems to have increased post-covid.
This is the story of a drink that is wrongly regarded as a highly alcoholic digestive.
How could this be possible in a population lacking the very enzyme that facilitates alcohol metabolism? Where the Chinese have their baiju – spirits distilled from sorghum-based cereal wine – the Japanese have their sake, made from fermented rice. The former contain up to 50° alcohol, the latter between 13 and 16°.
Deeply rooted in Japanese culture, to the point of having been elevated to the status of national drink, sake was most likely born in China. However, the Japanese have perfected its production, notably through the discovery of an ascomycete fungus.
Sake-making using koji, a kind of mold that transforms starch ingredients into sugar, has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the archipelago’s 23rd entry on this list, after nôgaku theater, washoku cuisine and local folk dances. Benefiting from the veritable Japan Mania that animates Europeans in search of exoticism and imbued with Kawaii culture – based on anime and manga – since their earliest childhoods in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, sake nevertheless suffers froma continuing disaffection in its country of origin.
Sake is not the only traditional alcoholic beverage to have been recognized by Unesco last December: shochu, a distilled liqueur (made from sweet potatoes, barley, rice, etc.) from south-western Japan, is also present, as are awamori (a traditional alcoholic beverage from Okinawa) and mirin (Japanese rice wine).
Ancestral know-how
Although the term sake refers to the famous beverage and, by extension, all Japanese alcoholic beverages, the Japanese population prefers the term nihonshu (日本酒, literally “Japanese alcohol”), to designate it more specifically.
Initially reserved for the imperial court, sake was also given as a sacred offering to the kami, the Japanese deities. At the heart of Shinto religious rituals, it earned the title of “drink of the gods”.
In the 8th century (Nara period), sake was given its letters of nobility by an edict of the imperial court. The sophistication of its production, thanks to the discovery of a fungus essential to the fermentation process, prompted the imperial palace during the Heian era (794-1185) to create a dedicated department. The department’s task was to ensure strict compliance with production techniques and its use in rituals. It wasn’t until the Edo Era (1603-1868) that the multi-stage brewing technique, virtually unchanged since then, became established.
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