Dry Sake or Sweet?
You spot a small Sake section while shopping for wine. You know enough about wine styles to tell a Riesling is sweet, a Merlot dry, but what about Sake? Can Sake even be sweet or dry? Do you know your preference? When shopping for Sake, you might look for something you tasted at a restaurant. If you can't find that, you grab whatever is cheapest, or something priced in the middle with an appealing label. Sound like you? Everyone, myself included, has shopped this way for some kind of specialty item. For Sake, this means consideration of sweet and dry becomes an afterthought, and you may end up with something terrible - or worse: something great that just wasn't for you! To help you judge dry and sweet, Japan developed a Sake Meter Value, or "SMV" ( Nihon Shudo , in Japanese). The scale is simple: any positive (+) number would mean dry, zero neutral, and negative (-) numbers sweet. Turns out, that scale was too simple... Japanese importer and distributor...