You are at the counter, the first piece of hirame has arrived, and the wine list is mostly sake with about nine wines on the back page. The default move is to order a Sauvignon Blanc, because someone once said white wine with fish. Two pieces later the wine tastes like cut grass and the fish tastes like nothing, and you cannot work out which one is at fault.
Raw fish is the hardest thing in this article to pair, and not for the reason people think. It is not that fish is delicate. It is that there are four separate things going on and only one of them is the fish.
The four variables
The fish itself is mild, clean and often faintly sweet. Lean white fish has almost no fat. Toro, hamachi, salmon and mackerel have a great deal. Those two ends of the range want different wines, and treating sashimi as one category is the first mistake.
Soy and salt. Every piece is going through soy, and salt is genuinely useful to you: it suppresses the perception of bitterness and astringency in wine and makes a lean wine taste fuller. Do not skip the soy on the assumption that it will interfere.
Umami. Dashi, aged fish, miso and soy are all high in glutamates. Umami has a well-documented effect on wine: it amplifies bitterness and astringency and suppresses the perception of sweetness and fruit. A dry, oaky, tannic wine tastes noticeably harsher against a dashi-based dish than it does alone. Salt counteracts this, which is why the soy helps and why the plain chawanmushi is harder to pair than the nigiri.
Sushi rice is not neutral. Shari is seasoned with rice vinegar, salt and sugar. So nigiri carries acidity and a little sweetness that sashimi does not, and the wine has to sit above the rice's acidity or it will taste flat.
Wasabi, meanwhile, is barely a problem. Its heat comes from allyl isothiocyanate, which is volatile and goes up your nose rather than sitting on your tongue. It clears in seconds and does not amplify alcohol the way chilli does.
Lean white fish, and most nigiri
You want high acid, low aroma, and a saline or slightly bitter finish that echoes the fish rather than covering it.
Chablis is the reference and it is correct — unoaked Chardonnay, chalky, high acid, no perfume competing with the fish. It has also become expensive. Three that do the same work:
- Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine sur lie. Aged on its lees, which gives a faint creaminess and weight without oak. Very high acid, saline finish, and one of the last genuinely under-priced wines in Europe. Often HK$150–250.
- Assyrtiko from Santorini. Higher alcohol than the others but with acidity high enough to carry it, and a stony, slightly bitter finish that suits shellfish and sea urchin.
- Koshu from Yamanashi. Low in alcohol, low in aroma, with a delicate bitterness on the finish. It is quiet to the point that some people find it empty on its own, and that is exactly why it disappears correctly behind hirame or tai.
Fatty fish: toro, hamachi, salmon, aji
Now there is fat to cut and more flavour to meet. Traditional-method sparkling is the strongest option — Champagne Blanc de Blancs, or a Crémant or Franciacorta if the Champagne mark-up is doing the deciding. Acid plus carbonation against fat is the same mechanism that works with fried food, and the toasty note from lees ageing meets the richness of the fish.
Aged dry Riesling from the Mosel or Rheingau is the other serious answer, particularly with vinegar-cured aji or saba, where you need acid to match the cure.
Grilled things: yakitori, teriyaki, unagi
Tare changes everything. It is soy plus mirin plus sugar, reduced and caramelised, so this is the same problem as char siu: sugar in the glaze makes dry wine taste thinner and more tannic. Now a red becomes reasonable, as long as it is fruit-forward and low in tannin. Pinot Noir, Gamay, or a Northern Rhône Syrah with negima, where the black pepper character reads as seasoning.
Sukiyaki and miso-braised dishes go further in the same direction — sugar, soy, fat, and real intensity. That is where a properly structured red genuinely belongs, and where mature Rioja or a Bordeaux with some age earns its place at a Japanese table.
Dashi-led and simmered dishes
Chawanmushi, oden, simmered vegetables. Very high umami, very little fat or salt to buffer it. This is where most wines taste harsh. The unexpected answer is oxidative and savoury wine, which meets umami with umami rather than fighting it: fino or manzanilla sherry served cold, Savagnin from the Jura, or Champagne with real bottle age. The trade-off is that all three are acquired tastes and none of them is a crowd-pleaser.
What does not work
Oaked Chardonnay with raw fish. Vanillin and toast against the iodine and marine character of fish produces a metallic result. Again: it is the barrel, not the grape.
Tannic red with raw or lightly cooked fish. There is a documented mechanism here rather than a superstition. Iron in wine catalyses the oxidation of the unsaturated fats in fish, and the aldehydes produced taste strongly and unpleasantly fishy. Wines higher in iron produce a stronger effect. So the useful rule is not red versus white — it is that a low-iron, light red is far safer with fish than a big one, and that is why.
And the Sauvignon Blanc you were about to order. New Zealand styles in particular are driven by thiols and pyrazines — passionfruit, cut grass, green pepper — and those are more assertive than raw fish is. It is not a clash so much as a takeover. With tempura or a chicken katsu it is fine. With hirame you will taste the wine and remember nothing about the fish.
None of this makes a choice right. It tells you what each one will do, which is the part you can use.
Where to start
Lean fish and most nigiri want high acid, low aroma and a saline finish; the dashi-led dishes want something savoury enough to meet umami rather than fight it. Those are two different bottles, and neither of them is the Sauvignon Blanc on the back page.
- Chablis — unoaked Chardonnay, chalky and high in acid, with no perfume competing with the fish
- Sherry — fino and manzanilla, served properly cold, for chawanmushi, oden and everything else built on dashi
- Domaine Bernard Defaix Chablis 2022 — village level rather than premier cru, which is the right weight to disappear correctly behind hirame