At a dinner table, here in Berlin. When friends come over, everyone brings a bottle from their own country to share. I wanted to bring something from Korea worth setting beside the others — and the choice here was almost nothing. A familiar bottle or two, yes; the real range, the drinks I love most, no. That gap stayed with me. We make such good drink back home — so why was so little of it here? That became the first line of SULDOK.

Because it had no language. Sake reached the world as “Japanese rice wine,” in a single phrase; tequila travelled with the Mexican sun. Korean drink had no such sentence — so the world only glimpsed it: a soju here, a makgeolli there, with the whole spectrum behind them left unsaid. What never got exported wasn’t the drink. It was the story around it.

The clear rice wines, above all — 약주 yakju and 청주 cheongju. Let a brew settle and draw off the clear liquor, and you have something with the length and structure of a fine white wine, built on 누룩 nuruk instead of grapes. For a continent that reads terroir, that is the conversation worth having. Makgeolli is the first taste most people have — the clear rice wines are where the real depth lies.

Right at the centre — though it got there long before the name did. Korean brewing runs on 누룩 nuruk: a cake of grain left to catch wild yeasts and moulds from the air, the room, the season. No packaged yeast, no laboratory strain. Every brewer’s nuruk tastes of its own place. What natural wine prizes today — a living culture, a sense of place — Korean brewing has quietly carried for centuries.

Completely. The same recipe in two villages becomes two different drinks, because the wild culture differs. Brew in deep winter and it’s slow, clean, precise; brew in high summer and it races. It’s terroir you taste in the ferment, not only in the field — which is why a family could hand one recipe down for generations and still be surprised by it.

That nuruk savouriness is the secret. A clear rice wine has the acidity to cut fat and the umami to sit beside it, so it reaches far past Korean food — it’s remarkable with aged cheese, with cured pork, with a simple roast chicken. We tell people: pour it where you’d pour a white Burgundy with a hidden depth.

We don’t call ourselves an importer. We’re a translation platform. We don’t bring in a bottle we bring in the time, the people, the scene held inside it. When we pour a European a glass, we don’t lead with the alcohol content. We tell them which village it comes from, whose hands made it, in which season.

What I’d love to open, one day, is a Korean-drink salon here in Berlin. Not a shop — a room where you can taste across the whole spectrum, learn what 누룩 nuruk does, and find the bottle that belongs on your own table. A place to sit down with Korean drink the way you would with wine. That’s the dream I’m working toward.