🍶 Tell Me 酒 #17 — Sake: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong

#### Leiden · Friday 28 August 2026 · 19:00 · (address shared after payment)

Hot, harsh, served at the end of the meal in a tiny porcelain cup you didn't really want. That's what most people think sake is. It's also almost entirely wrong — and quite often, that stuff isn't even sake. 🍶

For this chapter of Tell Me Wine, we're going somewhere the series has never been: Japan. And we're doing it because sake may be one of the most elegant, most misunderstood drinks on earth — a drink that in its homeland isn't called sake at all, but Nihonshu, and that began some 2,300 years ago not as a beverage but as an offering to the gods. 🏯

Forget everything the sushi bars taught you. Let's start again.

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##### 🍶 What the evening is

A guided tasting of eight sakes, built as a single arc — from the deepest traditional methods, through the small-producer revolution that changed everything in the 1980s, to something rare and extraordinary that spent ten years quietly waiting in a cellar. 🤫

I won't spoil the line-up. But I'll say this: it includes a bottle that's out of catalogue in Japan and genuinely hard to get hold of — and one sake that is meant to be drunk warm. Not out of ignorance, but by design, exactly as its maker intended. There's a difference, and by the end of the night you'll know precisely what it is. 😏

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##### 🧭 What we'll talk about

This is Tell Me Wine, so it's never just drinking — it's the stories behind the glass:

• 🌾 How sake is actually made — and why it's a small biochemical miracle. Wine has sugar ready to go; beer has to malt its grain first. Sake does both at once, in the same tank, in a process found nowhere else in the world.
• 🍚 The four ingredients — water, rice, yeast… and koji, the noble mould that makes the whole thing possible.
• 👘 The Toji — master brewers who live inside the kura all winter, each with their own yeast, their own water, their own signature. The independent vignerons of the East.
• ⚔️ The rebellion — how a handful of small brewers in the 1980s threw out post-war industrial sake and went back to the old ways. They did to sake exactly what the grower-champagne movement did to Champagne, twenty years earlier.
• 🌡️ Temperature — the single most misunderstood thing about this drink.

Oh, and one detail worth knowing: because of how it ferments, sake is made without added sulphites. If wine gives you a headache, this might be your evening. 😄

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##### 🍱 And to eat — Japan on the plate too

As always at Tell Me Wine, the glasses come with food. Alongside the eight sakes there'll be a selection of Japanese snacks, chosen to sit with what's in the cup — because you can't understand a drink without understanding the table it belongs to. Terroir in 360°, as ever. 🥢

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##### 💶 How it works — please read carefully!

Places are strictly limited to 12 people, so here's the process:

1. Click "Attending" (RSVP) here on Meetup.
2. I'll then send you a private message with the full recap and a payment link.
3. The fee is €35.
4. Your spot is only confirmed once payment is received — the first 12 to pay are in. 🎟️
5. Once you've paid, I'll send you the exact address in Leiden (the tasting is at a private location, so the address isn't public).

Please note there may be a short delay between your RSVP and my message — I send them out manually, so bear with me. 🙏

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##### 🗓️ Practical info

• 📅 When: Friday 28 August 2026 · 19:00
• 📍 Where: Leiden (exact address shared after payment)
• 🍶 Sakes: 8, served in a guided narrative arc, with Japanese snacks
• 👥 Spots: 12 only — first paid, first in
• 💶 Fee: €35 (confirms your place)
• 🌐 Language: English

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##### 👀 Who's this for?

Anyone curious about a drink they've probably never really tasted. Anyone who's been quietly suspicious of sake and would like to be proven wrong. And anyone who simply likes discovering something new in good company. You don't need to know a thing — that's rather the point. 🍶

RSVP, watch for my message, and let's go east.