Some sake with your penne?

When Trevor Hammond was a 15-year-old high school freshman in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, his grandfather was working in a McDonnell Douglas aircraft plant just outside Tokyo.

“I was already pretty bored with Kansas,” Hammond says now, “and since our local high school had a class in Japanese, I went to my mom and said, ‘If I take Japanese, will you let me go see Grandpa?’ ”

Mom said yes, and thus began a most unusual odyssey.

Although Hammond’s grandfather returned to Kansas before Trevor was able to visit him, the boy fell in love with the Japanese language and culture, and now -- at 27, living in Los Angeles -- he’s importing sake into the United States and trying to persuade wine stores and non-Asian restaurants here to carry it.

Sake is made in a brewery and fermented from rice (a grain), which would seem to make it more like beer than wine. But its flavor is actually much more like wine, so it’s a good companion for a wide variety of foods, and Hammond has had several successes in his first year of work. Sepulveda Wines, 20/20 Wines, the Wine House and Bristol Farms have stocked his sake, as do several non-Asian restaurants -- among them Balboa steakhouse on the Sunset Strip.

Sake in a steakhouse?

Well, Balboa is owned by the same group that owns the various Sushi Roku restaurants, so the idea of sake isn’t exactly foreign to management. Equally important, Jacques Perwin, the floor manager at Balboa and a sake aficionado, is the former general manager of Katana, a Japanese restaurant across the street, also owned by Sushi Roku.

“Besides,” says Brent Berkowitz, the general manager and wine buyer at Balboa, “probably 90% of our customers order seafood appetizers -- oysters, smoked salmon, shrimp cocktails -- and sake goes great with all of those. It’s crisp and acidic, with just a touch of sweetness on the back of the palate. It balances perfectly with seafood.”

Agreed.

When I had lunch with Hammond not long ago at Angelini Osteria in West Hollywood, he brought a bottle of Manotsuro Karakuchi-Kiippon Junmai Daiginjo sake from the Obata brewery on Sado Island in the Sea of Japan.

“Compai” (empty glass), he said, in the traditional Japanese toast, as we drank the sake to accompany chef Gino Angelini’s cuttlefish with red peppers, cherry tomatoes, capers and chives served in a cauliflower puree.

Although my westernized palate preferred the two Italian white wines that we also drank with the cuttlefish, I thought the sake made for an interesting -- and very different -- food and wine pairing.

We sent a glass to the chef.

Word quickly came back:

“Gino likes it. He says it doesn’t taste like any sake he’s ever had. He said, ‘It tastes like wine.’ ”

Beaming, Hammond explained: “One of the reasons it works is that Junmai is pure sake -- just water, yeast and fermented rice. No added alcohol.”

I was surprised. I thought the sake tasted more alcoholic than either of the wines. (It was: 15.8% alcohol compared with 12.5% and 14.5% for the wines.) But Hammond said Junmai accounted for only about 15% of the sake made in Japan, and the other 85% -- called Honjozu -- is even more alcoholic because it has alcohol added after fermentation. Honjozu sake is categorized as a distilled spirit, not a wine, by the U.S. government, though, and that makes it much more expensive to import.

In talks with breweries

Hammond’s Aristocrat Imports brings in only Junmai -- 11 different labels from eight different breweries.

What got him hooked on sake as a career?

“I studied Japanese and business in college, at the University of Kansas, hoping to get into international consulting of some kind,” he says. “In my junior year, I spent six months at a school in the Japanese countryside, and there were about 150 sake breweries within 100 miles of our campus.”

With little money and a college student’s interest in alcohol, Hammond recruited a few friends to join him in periodic train trips to free tastings at the breweries -- 25 trips in all.

“Before that,” Hammond says, “I’d had the typical American’s experience with sake. It was served scaldingly hot and tasted like bad vodka. But the sake we tried in Japan was served chilled, the way it’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t lose any of its flavor. It was very good sake, and the tasting process was very personal and the people were very open.

“Sometimes we got to taste with the owner or the toji [head brewer], and I was just fascinated by it all.”

After graduating from college in 1999, Hammond went to work for a consulting firm in Kansas City, hoping to be sent to one of its offices abroad, preferably in Japan.

After three years, he realized that wouldn’t happen terribly soon, so he began casting about for “an international business I could do on my own.”

He’d saved all the business cards and brochures from the breweries he’d visited in Japan, so early in 2002 he began e-mailing them.

His timing was good. With many young Japanese preferring beer and wine to sake, sake production has been declining in Japan. The number of sake breweries has fallen by almost 65% since 1970, and sake consumption has fallen 30% since 1989. Sake producers are eager for foreign markets to compensate for that decline, and several thought Hammond offered just that opportunity.

He visited the three breweries that showed the most interest in his plan, and last spring he signed a deal with his first client, Obata brewery.

“Then it took me a year to get the necessary licenses and permits,” he says. “The U.S. government doesn’t trifle with alcohol.”

But Hammond is persistent -- as witness his successful seven-month campaign to wean his then girlfriend off white Zinfandel and on to sake.

I suspect he wouldn’t have waged so vigorous a campaign with her were he not a sake importer: His dates could have gotten very expensive; sake costs substantially more than white Zinfandel. Hammond says his three sakes retail in wine stores for $24 to $68 a bottle. Bottles at Balboa are $42 and $158.

At those prices, it’s no surprise that Hammond can wax rhapsodic -- well, OK, it’s probably more chemistry than rhapsody -- about the different flavor profiles that result from the many kinds of rice used to make sake and from the different amounts of each grain of rice that are polished away in the milling process.

Sake’s place

He is not, however, monomaniacal about sake. When a plate of pasta with a venison sauce followed our cuttlefish appetizer at Angelini, he quickly reached for a glass of red wine -- a Barbera, as it turned out -- instead of the second sake he’d brought along.

“It’s a Junmai Ginjo, polished to 55%,” he said, meaning that more than half the fats, proteins and amino acids that make up the outside of the grain had been milled away, leaving the shinpaku, or “white heart,” of the grain that gives sake its pure flavor.

“I guess it doesn’t really work with this dish,” he said.

Would he have sake with any red meat -- say, with a steak at Balboa?

“Remember,” he said, “I’m from Kansas City. I can’t imagine drinking sake, or anything but red wine, with steak.

“On the other hand,” he said quickly, “with a shabu-shabu, where the flavor of the beef is muted somewhat by boiling, sake is really great.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous Matters of Taste columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.