In this article, we explore the best apps and websites for Japanese sake, focusing on their unique features and how they cater to sake enthusiasts.
Sake Rating Apps
Explore top sake rating apps that simplify the world of Japanese sake. Sakenowa, Sakenote, and Sakenomy are leading sake mobile apps, each offering unique features for sake enthusiasts. Whether you're interested in rating and reviewing sakes, creating a personal sake notebook, or purchasing sake directly from an extensive sake database, these sake applications provide valuable tools for your sake journey.
Sakenowa
Sakenowa, developed by a single-person web developer (Aiiro Systems Inc.), has cultivated an active community of sake enthusiasts who can easily share, like, and comment on sake reviews through the mobile app. Despite having no current monetization strategy, Sakenowa offers several unique features.
One standout is the automated sake flavor chart generation based on user reviews, providing easy-to-understand visualizations of sake characteristics for each brand and prefecture. Additionally, the app offers automatic translation of reviews into Chinese and English, enhancing accessibility for international users. The extensive sake database, with over 1 million reviews, is also viewable on the website, though reviews can only be submitted via the mobile apps.
Key Information:
- Released: 2014
- Monthly Visits: 31.6K
- Monetization: Not monetized
- English Version: Yes, uses DeepL for English and Chinese translations
- Mobile Version: Yes, responsive
- Mobile App: Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
- App Downloads: 10K+ on Google Play Store with a 4.1-star rating
Sakenomy
Sakenomy is operated by Japan Craft Sake Company, founded by former soccer star Hidetoshi Nakata. With 143K monthly visits and a popular app, Sakenomy is the closest equivalent to "Vivino" for sake. Users can bookmark, review, and directly purchase sake. The Sakenomy Shop offers over 600 sake bottles for purchase, and the database includes detailed information on over 50,000 sake bottles, complete with flavor notes, tasting charts, and brewery details.
The app is available in both Japanese and English, and it boasts a robust catalog featuring famous brands like Juyondai, Toyo Bijin, and Zaku. Additionally, Sakenomy occasionally holds lottery sales for limited-edition sake bottles for registered users.
Key Information:
- Released: 2021 (integrated shop opened)
- Monthly Visits: 143K
- Monetization: Integrated online store
- English Version: Yes
- Mobile Version: Yes, responsive
- Mobile App: Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
- App Downloads: 50K+ on Google Play Store with a 3.3-star rating
Sakenote
Sakenote is a sake application designed to help users create a personal sake notebook by saving and reviewing the sakes they have tried. It also features an online version that showcases recent sake rankings based on user reviews. The app is simple in design and functionality, allowing users to view their registered sakes in an album and optionally add review scores and pictures. Sakenote also allows users to search for and register sakes even while offline.
However, the app faces challenges in further growth without new functionalities and the necessary investment.
Key Information:
- Released: 2021
- Monthly Visits: 1.2K
- Monetization: Banner ads, affiliate links
- English Version: No
- Mobile Version: Yes, not responsive
- Mobile App: Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
- App Downloads: 100+ on Google Play Store
Sake Database & Ranking Websites
For those seeking the best in Japanese sake, several websites offer comprehensive sake reviews and rankings. SAKETIME leads with the highest visits and top-notch SEO, making it a go-to sake rating website. SakeWorld combines detailed sake information with informative articles, ideal for enthusiasts. Sakeno offers a straightforward platform for sake reviews and rankings, supported by affiliate links and ads. These sites are essential for discovering the best sake rankings and navigating the world of Japanese sake.
SAKETIME
SAKETIME is the most viewed sake ranking and review site, with an estimated 565.6K monthly visits (according to Similarweb). Launched in 2011 and operated by SAKETIME Inc., the website boasts excellent SEO capabilities, consistently appearing in the top three search results for Japanese sake queries in Japanese, often outranking Wikipedia and Amazon.
SAKETIME's monetization model focuses primarily on affiliate product listings on each sake brand page, featuring Rakuten, Amazon, and Yahoo! Shopping products via affiliate APIs. The site also includes a small number of banner ads and sells advertisement spots to sake brands and breweries.
The design of SAKETIME is somewhat old-fashioned but simple and user-friendly, reminiscent of the old FourSquare design. Users must register to review and bookmark sake brands. Reviews also require users to add photos, enhancing the visual appeal and credibility of the reviews. The site has a social component, allowing registered users to follow others, like, and comment on sake reviews.
Key Information:
- Released: 2011
- Monthly Visits: 565.6K
- Monetization: Affiliate links, banner ads, brand advertisements
- English Version: No
- Mobile Version: Yes, not responsive
SakeWorld
SakeWorld is a relatively new sake-focused media and database, operated by the Kyoto-based media publishing company, Leaf Publications Co., Ltd. Leveraging its roots in Kyoto, SakeWorld naturally highlights sake breweries and shops in the Kansai area, particularly around Kyoto and Osaka. The platform seamlessly blends informative sake articles and introductions to sake shops and restaurants with a comprehensive sake database. This database offers detailed information and a shop-like experience for users. As they explore and search for sake bottles and breweries, users can review and bookmark their favorites. SakeWorld provides detailed filters by region, sake classification, flavor, aroma, drinking style, and price range.
With frequent content releases, SakeWorld achieves around 50.1K monthly organic visits, an impressive feat for a site revamped in late 2023. In addition to Japanese and English, SakeWorld also offers a Chinese version, though the machine translations can sometimes be inaccurate for sake-specific terms. The company monetizes the website through its direct online shop, aged sake NFTs, and sponsored content in the media section.
Key Information:
- Released: Renewed in 2023
- Monthly Visits: 50.1K
- Monetization: Online shop, sponsored content, sake NFTs
- English Version: Yes, also available in Chinese
- Mobile Version: Yes, responsive
Sakeno
Sakeno is a well-established sake database known for its reviews and rankings, originating in the 2000s. Despite its age, the site still garners around 30.2K monthly organic visits, largely driven by effective SEO strategies (data from Similarweb). Visitors can easily rate sakes with simple good or bad votes without needing to create an account.
The platform offers an English version, although it is limited in both information and functionality. Currently, Sakeno doesn't seem to have active users. The site monetizes through affiliate links to major retailers such as Amazon, Rakuten Ichiba, and Yahoo! Shopping, alongside aggressive Google AdWords placements.
Key Information:
- Release: Before 2010
- Monthly Visits: 30.2K
- Monetization: Affiliate links, banner ads
- English Version: Yes
- Mobile Version: Yes, but not responsive
Why Is There No Vivino for Sake (Yet)?
Japanese sake and its labels can be challenging to decipher, even for Japanese people who may struggle with reading and pronouncing certain brewery and brand names. So, why isn't there a "Vivino" for sake—a simple app where a photo identifies the right sake? Although a few sake apps are attempting to tackle this issue, they face significant challenges. Unlike Vivino, the largest wine app with nearly 70 million users and over 100 million wine reviews, sake apps must contend with a more complex landscape of labels and a smaller market size, making it difficult to achieve the same level of success.
Challenge 1: Artistic Japanese calligraphy on hard-to-read sake labels
“Vivino” apparently follows an approach of OCR (optical character recognition, i.e. extracting text from pictures) and image recognition (i.e. comparing similar attributes in a picture to a certain set of existing data). This works well for wine labels, where there are many readable characters to be read by the computer. In the case for Japanese sake labels, the main label consists of a mixture of art and artistic Japanese characters, which are sometimes even hard to decipher for Japanese native speakers.
Challenge 2: Changing ambiente in an on-trade setting
“Vivino” (I witnessed it myself) is for the most part used in retail stores (when buying) or at home (when drinking). Here the ambient conditions, especially at retail stores, are bright. For Japanese sake it is quite the opposite: most of the sake is sold in an on-trade setting to restaurants and bars. Here the ambient conditions can largely vary depending on the place the consumer is visiting, leading to a wide range of picture qualities.
Challenge 3: Required computing cost vs. Japanese sake market size
Compared to the global wine market, the Japanese sake market size is extremely small (depending on the estimate a couple of percent). For example “Vivino” raised $221.8M over 8 rounds from 15 investors. In comparison, the largest official funding round of a sake startup was by Clear Inc with around $8.5M (1295M JPY) in total. Clear operates the largest sake media website SAKETIMES and promotes the luxury sake brand Sake Hundred. Another high-profile investment round of $6.5M (1000M JPY) in a sake startup was by Wakaze, the Paris-based sake brewery with ambitions to further expand to the North American and Chinese markets.
For a high-performing (fast response times) and highly accurate (high detection rate) system, the high computing cost associated with the training of the image detection models as well as the operating cost are barriers to entry.
Challenge 4: Complexity of Japanese sake
Vivino faced similar challenges at the beginning of their journey, grappling with the chicken-and-egg problem of collecting and populating enough wine data to make the platform interesting before sufficient user-generated content (UGC) was created. A similar issue exists for Japanese sake. With around 1,000 active sake breweries producing over 5,000 to 10,000 different brands, each with numerous bottles, and each bottle having unique characteristics such as rice type, yeast, polishing ratio, and pasteurization method, keeping up with the latest releases demands extensive research and manual entry. The relatively small scale and market size make it difficult to justify the resources needed.
Vivino overcame this by leveraging the vast scale of the wine market. It remains to be seen if a similar app for Japanese sake will emerge to solve these challenges.
Whether you're looking to rate and review sake, build a personal sake notebook, or explore detailed sake databases, these apps and websites offer valuable resources to enhance your sake journey.
