Sake Bleu!

While French winemaking runs in his blood, OLIVIER SUBLETT attained self-actualisation when he successfully created a rice wine, Le Guishu, for the Chinese market. Mischa Moselle finds out more

When French winemaker Olivier Sublett married a Dane, and then a Chinese woman, little did he know that both his ex and his current wife would help him create an entirely new category of drink.

Likewise, in a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences, when China’s leader Xi Jinping started his anti-corruption campaign, he couldn’t have known that he would push Sublett into realising the new project.

The project in question is, of course, Sublett’s Le Guishu. But don’t confuse the French rice wine with Japanese sake or Chinese yellow wine; it bears little resemblance to the first and none at all to the second. Made from grains grown in Camargue in southern France, it has a structure similar to that of its Japanese counterpart but very different flavours, not to mention a lower alcohol content of just 12.5 percent (undiluted sake contains 18 to 20 percent alcohol). If you had to compare it to a drink, it would be a grape wine – but even then, only two of the three wines in the Le Guishu range have flavours similar to Alsace Gewurztraminer wines; the last is a total outlier.

While rice has been grown in the Rhone Delta region for some 400 years, it has only been cultivated seriously since World War II, when Vietnamese labour was brought in to construct irrigation infrastructure much like those found in farms in the Mekong Delta, at that point a French colony. Before Sublett made wine with it, rice was mainly eaten in paellas by the region’s Spanish gypsy population.