An Inside Look at Selling Sake in the United States, Part II

Part II

Sara Guterbock, Certified Sake Advisor, is the Asian Portfolio Manager for Mutual Distributing Company, based in Raleigh, NC.  If you have had a glass of premium sake in North Carolina, there is a very good chance it passed through Mutual's hands.

I really wanted to know what Sara's thinking is in putting together a portfolio of sake for her clients to choose from, so I asked her what her thought process is, and what her goal is for her portfolios.

SG: "When it comes to buying and growing, what I'm trying to do is ensure that we don't rob Peter to pay Paul...With the break down of the type of accounts that we have, I can't have that many [sake] within each category because there's not enough demand yet to sell that many of those same styles within those brands to those accounts."

"The other thing that we have to be careful about is not letting inventory age. We start off with small quantities of things, and really try to make sure we are being cautious. I don't want to order 10 cases of namazake that we can't sell for two years because it really technically should be gone in 6 months...We don't want to grow that much faster than the market because we'll just end up having stuff that we can't move."

SP: Ultimately it's kind of a negative feedback loop- If people are being served sake that is past its prime...

SG: "Yeah, they'll have a bad experience and they won't come back to it...But getting back to what you said about how do you balance the list- I've got a few things that I've brought in that are true Japanese sakes that are actually similarly priced to the Sho Chiku Bai stuff, which is allowing me to help transition accounts who have sticker shock with quality sake into finer quality sake which will then open the door to more of the higher-end items."

"The other thing that I am trying to do is to offer more special order opportunities to those key accounts where they really are doing 60 sakes or so, they can have an opportunity to order something that would be just for them that won't necessarily be a broad market item, where we couldn't sell it to anybody else, but it still allows me to get it for them."

SP: Can you share with us what some of those sakes might be?

SG: “We are finally getting in some ishobin sizes...one of my main goals is to have people do more sake by the glass and not just in the cap bottles...and getting them into the 1.8 litres and having them to explore; even selling the whole bottle to a table in an izakaya style. This is the true Japanese experience, people! Sit down, order a giant bunch of stuff, share it, and drink a giant bottle of sake. You'll have a great time."

"A good example would be this one we brought in, the Flying Pegasus Koshu, from Hideyoshi. That's a sake that wholesales for more than Opus One, the wine. That actually started as a special order one-drop for an account that now I have more than one account using and we're actually keeping it as a regular item...Once you get the item set up and people realize you can get it for them, there is a lot of demand for those kind of things.”

Having bought more than one stale bottle of sake myself recently, I had to ask for Sara's thought on bottles without dates.

SP: Do you only buy sake that has dates on the bottle?

SG: "It's actually kind of impossible because not everybody does dates on the bottles that come in..I prefer to see the date...The other thing that's hard is that the way the date is printed doesn't always make sense to the consumer...and it's not always the brew date...My main thing is... I am constantly tasting. We had one that came from a supplier that will go unnamed. It was plainly not in good condition...Even though it was something that we had some distribution on, it was a pretty bottle, and people liked it. I said, 'you know, I don't like this.' I'm not going to keep selling this for exactly the same reason that you were talking about. I don't want people trying this and then saying, 'Yuck!' and then not wanting sake again.”

SP: Sure, especially if the bottle is $40-$50 dollars. That's a bad first date to have with sake.

Our conversation turned to the benefits of a well thought out, coherent sake list and her outlook:

SG: "Consumers come to beverage lists with wine in mind. They are used to looking at a beer list or at a wine list primarily, and maybe a few specialty cocktails and they will know that most wines lists are organized in a certain way...I've had a lot of people look at a sake list in New York, where there might be a more savvy clientele and say 'I want it to be like this: I want the Junmai Daiginjos together' and I tell them you can do it that way, but most consumers aren't going to come in looking immediately for that. They don't even know what they're looking for. We have to organize it in a way that they can identify with."

"So what I've done for a lot of people is I create a little section for hot sake, and then I have premium cold sake all together and I list them from lightest to sweetest, lightest and driest, to fullest and sweetest, just like you would with a wine list: lighter to fuller bodied. And then there is a separate section that has sparkling sakes, nigori sakes, and fruit flavors..sake with training wheels, basically. I've had a lot of people who have seen increases in sales just because they organized their list in a way that is a little more understandable for people."

SP: It's certainly very intimidating to see a list with 50 or 60 sake on there, and the names are filled with words that you don't understand. So how does somebody take that leap of faith and spend $40 or $50 and buy something that they have no idea about, and don't know what it is going to taste like. A lot of the times you see those descriptions of sake and they are very poetic...and then people taste the sake, and they might feel a little let down. So I think that your approach really makes sense.

SG:" Thank you."

SP: Do you have a particular style of sake that you prefer over others?

SG: "Well it depends a lot of times on what I am eating, but I am a big fan of yamahai and kimoto styles, the longer shubos where you get a lot more complexity in the sake. I really like and I see the place for the daiginjos, but I find that a lot of them almost start to taste kind of the same because the rice is polished and there's certain things that they are trying to be like. So I usually end up going into the ginjo category because where is a tremendous amount of variation, which I really like. It keeps me excited. I really have become a major fan of some yamahai and kimoto sakes also because of their versatility with food. These are sakes that you can, some of them, drink with a steak. A personal mission for me is to get people out of the thinking that Japanese people only east sushi, or that sake is only meant to be drunk with sushi. And when you really think about it, the Japanese don't really eat sushi like we do."

SP: I don't know how to thank you Sara, its been really great talking to you.

SG: "Thank you."