Латинская Америка открывает рынок сакэ: в Бразилии запускают масштабную программу обучения сомелье

Sake’s blue ocean: Latin America encounters Japan’s national drink At the ASI Sake Boot Camp in São Paulo, young sommeliers took part in a highly specialised immersion into sake. Though a largely unknown category, the region’s growth numbers help explain why Japan’s producers are so bullish about a wide-open market. Pedro Fadanelli reports. On the afternoon of 22 July, a conference room at the Associação Brasileira de Sommeliers (Brazilian Sommeliers Association) in São Paulo filled with roughly fifty young sommeliers in matching “#asibootcamp” t-shirts. Five unopened bottles of sake were lined up in front of each seat, the same five distinct bottles every sommelier in the room would go on to taste side by side. The session, “Sake Unveiled: Demystifying Japan’s National Drink,” was part of ASI Boot Camp Americas 2026, the sixth edition of a programme the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale runs each year to train a new generation of sommeliers. Most of them, this time, were from Latin America. For many in the room, this was less an introduction than a genuine deep dive: a beverage with a thousand years of brewing history in Japan, yet one that remains, for most of the world’s wine trade, a genuinely new category, tasted here as a serious subject of study rather than a shot that arrives alongside a sushi order. Demystifying sake, one misconception at a time Teaching the class was Fábio Ota, a São Paulo-based lawyer turned sake importer and distributor. A tax law specialist, Ota spent years in mergers and acquisitions – “stressful work,” as he told the room – before pivoting six years ago into importing and distributing Japanese sake in Brazil. His company now supplies roughly 600 restaurants and runs Miyabi, a 16-seat, gluten-free kaiseki restaurant built entirely around sake pairing. Ota’s pitch to the room was blunt: most of what sommeliers think they know about sake is either outdated or simply wrong. Sake, he explained, is brewed, not distilled, from rice, water, koji mould and yeast. Cloudy nigori sake, he noted, is often assumed to be unfiltered. In fact, Japanese law requires all sake to pass through a filter, nigori included; it is simply a coarser one. And more highly polished rice doesn’t automatically mean a better sake, despite what a generation of restaurant customers has been trained to assume when reflexively ordering Ginjo or Daiginjo. The strongest selling point, in his telling, is umami: sake contains roughly four times more glutamic acid, the amino acid behind savoury flavour, than wine or beer. It also contains no sulfites at all, a genuine advantage, he said, for guests with sulfite sensitivities. Both traits make it a natural partner for dishes that are difficult to pair with wine, from raw seafood to charcoal-grilled food and pungent ingredients such as wasabi or ginger. One fact drew visible surprise from the room: 80 to 90% of the distilled alcohol added to Japanese sake today, used in honjozo and other non-junmai styles, is made from Brazilian sugarcane and refined in Japan. Long before Brazilian drinkers started paying attention to sake, in other words, sugar from Brazil had already found its way into nearly every bottle. Five sakes, five different worlds The tasting flight drove home Ota’s point about education: five sakes, poured side by side, revealed just how wide sake’s stylistic range really is, a spectrum most first-time tasters, sommeliers included, have never seen laid out in a single sitting. The line-up ran from a hazy, low-intervention Usunigori from Yamanashi to an internationally awarded Junmai Daiginjo from Mie prefecture; a Kimoto Junmai Ginjo from Akita; a traditional Yamahai Junmai from Wakayama; and a pale-blue-bottled Sasanigori Junmai Ginjo from Gifu, served ice-cold. Some were structured and savoury, built for food; others were light, floral and almost delicate. The point, as Søren Polonius, ASI’s director, put it during the class, is that sake shouldn’t be benchmarked against wine at all: “It’s a completely different creature,” with a short, clean finish that lets a dish’s own flavours take over, something wine, in his words, “would never be able to do in that kind of way.” The numbers behind the event Ota’s closing remarks included a market briefing built on fresh JSS export data, and the story is a bullish one. Latin America’s sake imports grew 26% by volume and 21% by sales value in 2025 (compared with 2024), comfortably outpacing growth in many longer-established sake markets. Examining those 2025 figures, Brazil is the clear engine, accounting for about 73% of the region’s import volume and 58% of its sales value, and still growing at nearly 25% year-on-year. Chile and Argentina, growing off a smaller base, posted the sharpest gains of all: Chilean import value more than doubled, and Argentine volume grew by 76%. Set against the United States, which alone imported roughly sixteen times more sake by volume in 2025 than all of Latin America and the Caribbean combined, the region still looks small. But that, in the view of nearly everyone teaching at the Boot Camp, is precisely the opportunity: Latin America is one of the only sizeable wine-drinking regions in the world where sake hasn’t yet had its moment, which means almost all of its growth still lies ahead. Ota, who has worked alongside JSS on masterclasses in Buenos Aires in 2025, described Argentina today as looking “almost like Brazil ten or fifteen years ago,” not as a knock, but as a preview of where the region is headed. Even Brazil, the regional leader, carries an estimated 60 to 80 different sake brands on the market today, against roughly 3,000 brands from more than 1,200 producers in Japan. That gap is the blank canvas: sake is a category the region has barely begun to taste, with most of its growth still to come. Brazil’s head start isn’t only commercial. The country is home to the largest Japanese diaspora outside Japan itself: well over a million people of Japanese descent, heavily concentrated in and around São Paulo, sitting atop a Nikkei food culture more than a century in the making. That gives Brazil something no other market in the region has: restaurants, importers and curious consumers who already spoke the language of Japanese ingredients, long before sake specifically appeared on anyone’s radar. The JSS and the ASI aren’t building sake culture in Brazil from scratch; they’re building it on top of infrastructure that already exists, which is a large part of why the numbers here are moving faster than almost anywhere else in Latin America. A patchwork across the region That unevenness became clear firsthand when comparing notes with sommeliers from elsewhere in the region during the camp. In Uruguay, sommeliers described access to sake as still extremely limited, with little local distribution to speak of and, in their view, a market where most consumers do not yet know the category exists at all. Peru offered a sharper contrast: sommeliers there are noticeably more familiar with sake, helped along by the country’s Nikkei culinary tradition, but several said the market still lacks range, the kind of side-by-side diversity on show at the Boot Camp, from a delicate usunigori to a structured kimoto junmai ginjo, is exactly what they say is missing at home. Canada, further afield but represented at the Boot Camp too, illustrated the opposite problem. A Canadian sommelier said sake is easy enough to find there, sold through the country’s government-controlled liquor stores, but that everything he had tried so far was entry-level; he had yet to come across the more premium, distinctive styles that define the category at its best. Still a restaurant drink, for now The barrier the room kept returning to wasn’t logistics or price, it was perception. For most Latin American drinkers, sake still means a small glass poured at a Japanese restaurant table, not a category with its own producers, regions and styles. That is beginning to shift at the very top of São Paulo’s dining scene. In April 2026, Tuju and Evvai became the first restaurants in Brazil, and in Latin America, to be awarded three Michelin stars. Both list sake on their menus, a detail that would have been hard to imagine at that level of fine dining in Brazil a decade ago, and one that points to where the category’s ceiling in the region really sits: not confined to Japanese restaurants, but at the very pinnacle of the market. That shift mirrors a broader change under way in Brazilian fine dining: tasting menus, native-ingredient-driven cooking and fermentation-heavy techniques have all gained ground in São Paulo’s top kitchens over the past decade. Those are the same conditions, several sommeliers argued during the class, that make a food-first, low-intervention drink like sake a far easier sell on a wine list (or a sake list, or a pairing menu) today than it would have been ten years ago. That, more than logistics, is where the sommeliers in the room saw their own role. And it was clear from the reactions during the class (the back-and-forth over how sake’s short finish compares with wine, for instance) that the session had shifted more than a few assumptions. Júlio Kunz, vice-president of the Associação Brasileira de Sommeliers (ABS-RS), said the experience changed how seriously he takes the category: tasting five sakes scored and discussed with the same rigour as a wine flight was, for many in the room, the first time sake had been presented as a subject worth studying rather than a drink to sample once at a Japanese restaurant. In a short conversation after the class, Kunz framed sake’s opportunity in almost identical terms to Ota’s: the biggest obstacle isn’t availability, but the fact that most consumers, and many working sommeliers, have never been taught even the basics, from what umami means to the difference between Junmai and Honjozo. Going forward, he said, the priority for the ABS and for sommeliers like him is to recommend and study sake more deliberately, treating it as a category worth building expertise in rather than a novelty. Sake, he suggested, could plausibly become “the next wine” for curious Brazilian drinkers precisely because it offers a lower-alcohol, food-driven alternative at a moment when diners are already seeking exactly that, but only if the education happens first. “We’re still only getting a first sip,” he said, “of a market that’s genuinely enormous.” What comes next For the JSS, the Boot Camp model is a deliberate long game: put sake in front of the sommeliers who will build wine lists for the next decade, before their habits set around any other beverage. For Latin America, and Brazil especially, the ingredients for a genuine category takeoff are already on the table: the region’s large Nikkei community; a fine-dining scene developing fast enough to produce Latin America’s first three-Michelin-star restaurants in the same year, with sake already poured at both; and an import market growing at more than 20% a year from a base still small enough that today’s importers and educators could plausibly shape how an entire region learns to drink sake. Whether that momentum turns into bottles on non-Japanese menus across Rio, Mexico City, Santiago and Buenos Aires will depend less on shipping routes than on rooms exactly like the one at ABS São Paulo, and, on this evidence, JSS and ASI are betting there will be many more of them. Related news How Minuty became an emblem of St-Tropez charm DrinksBox trade platform offers national distribution with LCB