John Gauntner

About

Leading sake evangelist, educator, promoter, taster, assessor, author, speaker, exporter. John Gauntner is recognized as the window to making sake understandable and popular outside of Japan. He is the founder and publisher of Sake Industry News, a twice-monthly newsletter covering news from the sake industry in Japan as well as slightly advanced technical topics. Several times each year, he runs the Sake Professional Course, a week-long intensive sake study course, held both in and outside of Japan, as well as the advanced level of that course. As of January 2020, he has run the course 50 times. More than 2000 people from 14 countries have taken SPC. When running the course live and in-person became infeasible due to COVID-19, he took SPC online, and runs it in that format four times a year. Known as “The Sake Guy,” and “The Sake Evangelist,” John has been quoted and/or mentioned in sake related articles in countless publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, Business Week, and Rolling Stone. He has spoken at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities, Wharton School of Business, and countless other venues across the US and Japan. In 2006, he was awarded the Sake Samurai designation the very first year it was awarded by the Junior Council of the Japan Sake and Shochu Producer’s Association, for helping to promote sake and sake culture around the world. In May of 2015, he became the first and only non-Japanese – and in fact the first person outside of the sake industry – to participate as a tasting judge in the final tasting round of the Zenkoku Shinshu Kampyoukai, or National New Sake Competition, the most prestigious sake tasting competition in the industry. He has also achieved the very difficult Sake Expert Assessor certification from Japan’s National Research Institute of Brewing. No other non-Japanese in the world has both of these certifications. Learn more about them elsewhere on this site. He has been writing and lecturing about sake since 1994, and has published six books on sake across two languages, hundreds of articles on the topic (see www.sake-world.com), publishes a free monthly newsletter as well as the above mentioned Sake Industry News. He is the co-founder and content editor of the world’s first and only sake-only magazine, Sake Today, which was founded in January of 2014.