Rather than make a wine and then fish for foods with which to pair it, why not style a wine to accompany a specific type of food?
Chaim Gur-Arieh has done just that. His questing, inventive and original mind has created a series of wines carefully conceived to complement sushi and sashimi.
Chaim and his artist wife Elisheva are the engaged proprietors of the Sierra-foothill vineyard and winery C.G. Di Aire.
There, they have been abiding by the given goals of a winery in the foothills, turning out faithful and precisely enunciated takes on local staples Zinfandel, Primitivo, Barbera and Syrah, though over the past two decades Gur-Arieh has won a reputation for uncommonly intricate blends and for mastering one of the more recalcitrant grape varieties in the region, Cabernet Sauvignon.
Now, 50 years after he and Elisheva frequented Yoshi’s Sushi in Berkeley during their courtship, he turned his attention to coming up with a wine that would complement without upstaging the pure, distinctive and finely nuanced flavors and textures of fresh seafood, as well as other Japanese-inspired dishes.
The result, now rolling out to the market, is Hikaru: The Sushi Wine.
Three styles make up the initial release:
There’s a dry and flinty Sauvignon Blanc meant to accompany hamachi, octopus, kanpachi and sagoshi, among other selections of similarly restrained seafood.
There’s a crisp, fruity and lightly effervescent “Bubbly Rosé,” a blend of Grenache, Primitivo and Syrah, intended to be paired with more pronounced seafood such as spicy tuna, spicy scallop and toro, as well as lively dishes like shishito peppers, agedashi tofu and nasu miso eggplant.
And there’s a dark and spicy “Chilled Red Blend” with suggestions of cherries, smoke and herbs, a mix of Barbera, Primitivo, Zinfandel and Grenache, to be paired with grilled miso-glazed black cod, tempura udo, salmon teriyaki and similarly forthright Japanese dishes.
Whether the culinary world wants a wine styled to dovetail neatly with sushi remains to be seen, but Gur-Arieh is convinced that wines conceived to respect the principles of harmony, balance and detail in sushi have as much right to a place at the table as such traditional sushi beverages as beer and sake. More, even, he suggests, given that beer and sake tend to be soft on the palate, lacking the revitalizing acidity that wine can bring to the pairing of food and wine.
Few people are as well positioned to test such a hypothesis. Until he and Elisheva moved to El Dorado County to take up grape growing and winemaking two decades ago, Gur-Arieh was a food technologist with a solid string of hits to his credit. Few pantries in the country likely are without at least one of the products to bear his inspired fingerprints – Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, Tiger’s Milk Bar, Power Bar and the colorful, entertaining breakfast cereal Cap’n Crunch.
Nonetheless, Hikaru – “to shine” in Japanese, and pronounced “he-car-oo” – is a group more than individual effort. The couple’s daughter Sivan heads up the project. Hikaru has its own website separate from the C.G. Di Aire website. What’s more, the family collaborated with Jin Joo, owner/chef of the Berkeley restaurant Kamado Sushi, to refine the wines and to match them with Japanese dishes.
Chaim and Elisheva Gur-Arieh
“We created Hikaru to hold sushi in the limelight,” says Gur-Arieh, who holds a PhD in food science from the University of Illinois.
Their guiding principle is their belief that the umami flavors of Japanese cookery pair best with wines that are light-bodied and fairly acidic. That conviction prompted them to focus on light- to medium-bodied grape varieties with sharp acidity, principally Sauvignon Blanc, Barbera, Zinfandel and Primitivo, all grown on their 42-acre estate vineyard at 1700 feet up the Sierra foothills, just northeast of Plymouth, Amador County.
The grapes are crushed and fermented separately by variety, aged in French oak barrels to avoid the heavier imprint of American oak, and then blended to achieve wines to complement without overpowering sushi and sashimi.
Early reception to the wines has been encouraging, with more than a dozen Asian markets in Sacramento stocking Hikaru, as well as several restaurants specializing in sushi. The suggested retail price is $8.33 per 250-milliliter can, $25 per 750-milliliter bottle, though Oto’s Marketplace along Freeport Boulevard in Sacramento is offering the cans at an introductory price of $5.49 each.