NV Katafune Tobin Daiginjo Niigata 750 ml

Katafune is a desert-island sake producer. They're one of our absolute favorite brewers, combining beautiful harmony and delicacy with an intensity of flavor like few others, which is why they’re a standby at Michelin-starred hotspots like The French Laundry and SingleThread. 

Takeda San, the man behind this magic, is recognized globally for this pioneering style of sake, which he crafts with a unique brewing process and pure mountain snowmelt from Niigata (the area we refer to as Japan's "Napa Valley"). And the Katafune Tobin Daiginjo is the greatest sake he makes. It’s his tête de cuvée, a careful selection of his finest sakes, matured in glass vessels until he feels it's at its peak. 

We adore this sake for its vibrant personality and seductive aromatics, which are wedded to a silky, lush texture. In an ideal world, you'll pair this with fine caviar, but we also adore it with shellfish towers of all stripes, and even pasta alfredo if we're keeping it casual. 

On our first visit to the Katafune brewery, we were shocked. We'd expected a high-tech, glistening stainless steel operation, but what we found was an artisanal workshop complete with fermenting experiments and the energy of an inventor. While touring the facility, we entered a temperature-controlled room that made us shiver. The room, kept at a steady sub-30-degree temperature, was filled with tall glass vessels. We’d never seen another room like it in any of our 100+ brewery visits.

He smiled, because we'd noticed the Katafune difference: After fermentation and filtering, Katafune's sakes rest in these tanks, called Tobins, to mature at a steady rate. "There is no recipe," he said. "I wait and taste until the sake is perfect before we bottle it." This bottling takes its name from those glass vessels—and the bottle takes its shape from them too. 

The sake is made from Koshitanrei rice, which is Niigata's most prized cultivar, polished until well over half of the grain has been removed before brewing. The result is a sake that's vibrant and seductive, with aromatics of purple flowers, blood-orange peel, and spice—and a palate that's both lush and focused, with a silky texture.