What Wine Goes With Sushi and Sashimi?

An off-dry Riesling copes with a whole sushi meal better than anything else. If you would rather stay dry, Albariño, Sauvignon Blanc or a glass of Champagne will all do the job.

Most advice on this starts with the fish, which is the wrong end of the problem. Sashimi is clean, delicate and close to neutral; it asks only that the wine stays light and gets out of the way. Everything genuinely difficult about the match comes from what is served with it.

It starts with the rice, not the fish

Shari is not plain rice. Cooked short-grain rice is folded through with a seasoning of rice vinegar, sugar and salt — a common ratio is four parts vinegar to two of sugar to one of salt — so every piece of nigiri arrives already acidic and faintly sweet before the fish is counted.

Two things follow. The wine needs genuinely high acidity or the vinegar in the rice will make it taste flat and dull. And a trace of sugar in the wine never feels out of place here, because it is answering sugar that is already on the plate.

Wasabi, soy and ginger

Wasabi is the reason the Riesling wins. Its heat is volatile and shoots up the nose, and alcohol makes it burn harder while a little residual sugar buffers it — so a low-alcohol, off-dry wine is doing two useful jobs at once. Worth knowing: the green paste almost certainly is not wasabi. The usual estimate is that 99% of the wasabi served in North America is horseradish with mustard powder, starch and green colouring — and even in Japan the figure is put at around 95%. Real Wasabia japonica wants cold running water and about two years in the ground before the rhizome is worth pulling, which is why almost nobody bothers.

Soy sauce brings salt and glutamate. Salt softens the way you perceive acidity, which flatters a sharp white; umami does the opposite to tannin, making it taste harsher. Dip the fish, not the rice: rice drinks soy up and then collapses, and it is the extra salt that flattens the wine. Pickled ginger is a palate reset between pieces and will not fight the wine.

Between them, wasabi and soy strike most of the wine list. Tannic reds go first, for the umami reason above. Oaked Chardonnay goes for a different one: its buttery weight settles on top of raw fish and stays there, so you taste the barrel and nothing else. And anything genuinely sweet turns the rice sugary and the fish sour — our wine sweetness chart shows where off-dry actually sits, which is drier than most people assume.

What to actually order

• Off-dry Mosel Riesling — a Kabinett is the single most versatile bottle for a mixed sushi order, and the only one that handles wasabi properly. Often 7.5–9% alcohol, which is the whole point.
• Albariño — the dry pick. Grown on granite a few miles from the Atlantic in Rías Baixas, where the local cooking is almost entirely shellfish, it has a salinity that suits raw fish exactly.
• Sauvignon Blanc — best with cucumber, avocado and vegetable rolls, where its green herbal streak has something to talk to. Less convincing with fatty tuna.
• Champagne or any dry sparkling — bubbles plus acidity, and a brut carries under 12 g/l of residual sugar, so it stays properly dry.

One last thing. In Japan the drink that comes with sushi is agari — green tea brewed very hot and very strong, usually from konacha, the dust, buds and broken leaf left over from processing sencha and gyokuro. Sushi counters pour it because it strips fish oil off the tongue between pieces, which a cold glass of wine does less well. Keep a cup going alongside the bottle.