By The Glass Chuck Furuya

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2005 Oroya goes well with sushi and other Asian foods

Why not order wine at a sushi bar? Why limit your choices to beer, sake, water or tea?

The 2005 Oroya (roughly $11) is an innovative -- though totally unorthodox -- white wine, crafted by Japanese winemaker Yoko Sato specifically for sushi and other Asian-style foods.

The grapes are grown in Tierra de Castilla, Spain, and the 2005 is a blend of 60 percent airén for aromatics, 30 percent macabeo for acidity and 10 percent muscat for sweetness and roundness. The resulting wine is effortlessly light in body and low in alcohol, done simply. It is refreshing and merges well with the sweet-sour tension of sushi rice, the nose-piercing heat of wasabi and the saltiness of soy sauce.

I recently tasted this wine with several kinds of sushi and must say it works surprisingly well. See for yourself.

Black, black wine

Where have all of the petite sirahs gone? Perhaps these rugged, somewhat coarse, bordering-on-gritty black wines just fell out of vogue and more business-oriented grape farmers have replaced their old P.S. vines with more fashionable, more in-demand grapes, such as syrah or pinot noir.

Well, for those of my generation (and older) who have a hankering for some good old, black petite sirah, consider the 2004 Four Vines, "The Heretic" (roughly $28). This is a teeth-staining (and glass-staining), hearty, robust rendition crafted from two Paso Robles, Calif., old-vine parcels.

We should put this one on the endangered list.

'Boutique' champagne

How many times have you read in the wine press or heard someone talk about a "boutique" wine from California? Boutique in this context is supposed to mean a handcrafted, artisan wine of much better quality than that produced by larger, often corporate-run wineries.

If that is true, then it should be OK to apply that to France's Champagne region as well. A recent boutique champagne arrival to the islands is the nonvintage Diebolt-Vallois Brut (roughly $42), which is a Cramant-based small house dedicated to producing small batches of grand cru champagne.

The recent release is fine, delicate, fragrant and aristocratic, with small, fine bubbles and a long, long finish. Truly superb. And it is never too early to stock such hard-to-get specialties to ring in the New Year.

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