Xander Soren’s Wines Make a Case for Pinot Noir With Sushi

I’m running late to meet Xander Soren for a wine tasting at Maison Healdsburg, but my tardiness turns out to be perfectly fine. While he waited, Soren struck up a conversation with a couple at the bar, poured them samples of his namesake label’s new chardonnay, and was happily conversing over tasting notes when I walked in. It’s the perfect vignette to illustrate who Soren is and his unabashed enthusiasm for wine, something that comes through no matter who he’s with, whether it’s industry folks, journalists, trade contacts or just a couple of local wine lovers at a neighborhood bar. It helps that he’s an investor in the bar, and that they stock his wines, but his earnest desire to share a glass of wine with just about anyone remains.

Soren’s recent, rather idiosyncratic wine project is the second phase of his career: previously, he spent decades working in the music industry; he was one of the co-creators of GarageBand and worked at Apple developing key features of the iPod, iTunes and iPhone. Clearly, his technical skills are superb, but it’s his soft skills that helped him launch a line of Burgundian-style California wines designed to pair with Japanese cuisine and, in particular, sushi. Until now, these releases were strictly limited to pinot noir, but in the last few months, he’s debuted a pair of chardonnays that up the ante for his brand.

“The logical question was ‘where’s your chardonnay?’” Soren, an amateur winemaker driven by a long-standing love for Japan, tells Observer. “The statement of being influenced by Burgundy meant the question came up more than I realized it would, so it was time to make that jump.” Upon visiting Japan for the first time about 15 years ago, Soren was immediately taken by the way high-end sushi was being paired with pinot noir—not sake, like in America. The wine pairings were always French, though, and when he asked chefs about California wines, they weren’t familiar with the delicate, cool-climate styles that had more recently come into vogue. 

Confident the concept could work, Soren began experimenting with producing California pinot noir specifically designed to pair with Japanese food. He worked as an amateur for years before partnering with acclaimed winemaker Shalini Sekhar and sourcing fruit from California vineyards, including Fiddlestix and Sanford & Benedict, for polished, professional vintages beginning in 2019. Released in 2023, Xander Soren Wines launched in Japan and was almost immediately adopted by major players in Tokyo, Kyoto and Ginza, racking up accolades from revered omakase restaurants and hospitality meccas like Park Hyatt Tokyo.

“That one was a big win for me, because I love Lost in Translation,” he confides, as we leave his new friends at the bar and grab a nearby table, where he begins to line up a football team’s worth of glasses for our tasting. “Luxury hotels like that, and a three-star Michelin omakase called Sushi Sakai in Fukuoka, were both part of feeling like Japan really embraced the wine.” Scanning the brand’s Japanese customer list reveals well over 100 restaurants, shops and omakases that now stock Xander Soren; since the label’s launch in the U.S. just one year later, in 2024, a handful of significant California venues, like Healdsburg’s own SingleThread, have followed suit. 

But the shift to pairing wine with sushi is still a relatively new phenomenon, and one that often needs to be experienced to be appreciated. For years, diners dismissed the idea outright, assuming the wine would clash with the vinegar used to treat sushi rice. But both the popularity of much lighter red styles, like pinot noir, and a shift to serving these wines at colder temperatures mitigated that drawback quite a bit. And though conventional wisdom says white wine is the correct option for seafood, omakase chefs and Japanese sommeliers often go in a different direction.

“Japan was where I first saw pinot noir being paired with fish,” Soren says, recalling his first visits to the country starting around 2010. “There are qualities of our Olivet Lane pinot noir that work really well with tuna because the wine has an iron content, so it matches with the earthiness.” Even in America, popular high-end Japanese restaurants like Sushi Note in L.A., which serves a 20-course omakase with wine pairings, or the acclaimed N/Naka, offer elaborate drink selections that feature red varieties—Soren’s wines included. 

But his expansion into whites is a significant milestone, not only fulfilling his Burgundian ambition (the storied French region is widely known for producing both pinot noir and chardonnay), but also nudging the holdouts who still can’t get their minds around pairing red wine with sushi. There are practical implications, too; for example, an entire dinner with only red pairings can get tedious for some, no matter how superb the wine might be: “It worked, but there’s still the expectation that you’re going to ease into that,” Soren says. 

Those factors, plus a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work with fruit from Alma Rosa’s historic El Jabali vineyard, originally planted by Richard Sanford in 1983, set the plan in motion. This spring, the label released a crisp, Chablis-influenced chardonnay called Habari, named after a Japanese flower-trimming technique that plays on the El Jabali name, and the more traditional Xander chardonnay, with notes of tropical fruit, a little bit of oak and some malolactic fermentation.

Now armed with an entire spectrum of releases, Soren’s wines can do the work of convincing nonbelievers that wine is a beverage suitable for pairing with sushi. And yet, even he knows it doesn’t always work. “There are certain fish that my wines work really well with, like Olivet Lane with tuna, and Ludeon works really well with some of the richer fishes,” he says. “But some are more challenging. Oily silver or blue fish, mackerel and certain cuts often don’t work with wine, and usually go better with a nice crisp sake.” 

Call it taste, preference or just habit, but I’m personally more likely to grab a glass of something white and crisp to go with fish than a red, even as a lover of pinot noir. Since I’m also on the fence when it comes to most chardonnay, I was initially skeptical about the new line, but Soren’s palate is firmly aligned with the direction California wine is going. He produced not one, but two expressions that will be ideal for food pairings. “We sometimes jokingly say we wanted to create a traditional California chardonnay for people who hate California chardonnays,” he says. “They’re not big, oaky bombs. Chardonnay has to be super elegant—if it’s too buttery, it’s not my jam.”

Starting with these restrained chardonnays, particularly the Habari, offers a solid introduction to pairing wine and sushi for the first time. Consider pouring a glass of this mineral-driven white with notes of grapefruit and white flower to drink with oysters, mussels or other shellfish. If you’re eating Japanese food, pairing it with flounder (hirame) or scallop (hotate) sashimi is superb; so is grilled mackerel, because the natural fats bring out even more acidity in the wine. The Xander chardonnay is much more traditional, making it a no-brainer pairing for miso-glazed black cod, a Japanese dish made famous by Nobu, or sea eel (anago) and kinmedai (golden-eyed snapper).

If those pairings go well, and you’re in the mood to try the red wine and sushi approach, tap into the Olivet Lane pinot noir, made with fruit sourced from the Russian River Valley, and have it with some tuna. Sure, there’s a chance it won’t suit you at first, but then, maybe, the earthiness starts to come through, and your palate slowly forms a new affinity. And that process, of watching someone who was previously a nonbeliever fall down the rabbit hole, is what makes the whole venture worth it for Soren. 

“The best part is that now, every day, I log into my phone and somebody around the world is just discovering the brand,” Soren says. “Whether it’s on Instagram or some other form of social media, they’re posting about trying my wine with unexpected food pairings and loving it. That’s one of the reasons I did this: to meet people and to share this. It’s validating, and it makes me proud, but it’s also just fun.”