Sake’s steady but certain rise

I recently read that the UK is on the verge of a sake boom. The trade press article reported “a healthy increase in popularity”, with the St James’s wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd noting “a 1,000% increase in sales between 2023 and 2024” and “heaps of coverage in the press”. Normally sake gets next to no coverage in the press so this was news to me. I thought then that I should check and see if there really is a breakthrough, or if, like previous claims for Riesling or Muscat, the hype outweighs the evidence.