Is marinating raw fish in sweet fortified wine safe, or will the presence of sugar foster bacteria growth ?
The wine is 16.5% ABV and the whole thing is kept in a fridge.
Fish – Is marinating raw fish in sweet fortified wine safe
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You can have raw chicken in restaurants in Japan - it's delicious. Depending on where you live there may be better or worse food safety standards, but there is nothing poisonous about raw chicken itself.
By the way, sushi is a dish with vinegary rice. The raw-meat dish is Sashimi. A picture of chicken sashimi:
You will note that in this photo the chicken is actually not raw but quite rare. The exterior of the chicken flesh is actually seared and cooked through several millimeters.
There is no practical difference in spoilage time for wrapped versus unwrapped. Spoilage is a factor pretty much of temperature, since in practice, all foods have pathogens present which can breed.
Assuming your refrigerator is free of insects, dogs and similar macro-fauna, wrapping is to prevent odors from going from one food to another, drying, or cross-contamination of one food by another through drips or splashing. Now, outside of a refrigerator, where ants, flies, and so on are abundant, wrapping also provides a physical barrier to prevent infestation, but the body of the refrigerator already does that.
In fact, in some rare occasions, you may wish to specifically refrigerate your meat unwrapped: for example, after brining a turkey, refrigerating it for 24 hours unwrapped will permit the skin to dry out, and permit a more crispy result.
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Best Answer
Without knowing the wine and the sugar content as well as whether you are adding anything else to the marinade, we can't say much. I would hazard a guess that you should be fine (speaking as a microbiologist...), however it will depend on how fresh the fish is, how heavy a contamination you are likely to have in the first place, and the preparation conditions for the flesh.
Alcohol is moderately good at inhibiting some bacterial species, though not some yeasts (these are what produce the alcohol in the wine fermentation). However, studies have found that enteric bacteria, such as those that commonly cause food poisoning are not inhibited fully by the percentages found in wine, indeed - you would need more like 70% (commonly used in microbiology labs for sterilization of surfaces), or even higher % for bacteria found in the ice in drinks served in a bar to completely kill bacteria.
On the other hand, sugar is actually fairly good in its own right as an inhibitory substance, but you also need fairly high concentrations; in the area of 25% (in the upper range for sweet wines) before it inhibits most bacteria. Below this sort of range, many bacteria will metabolize the sugar and grow quite well.
The best factor you have here is the keeping it all in the fridge - cold is pretty good at inhibiting most bacterial species from growing.