How Japan’s winemaking community doubled in a decade

Etienne de Montille is a famous producer in Burgundy, with a château in Puligny-Montrachet, a busy winery in Meursault and 37 hectares of vines in fancy appellations on the Côte d’Or. But, atypically for the owner of a Burgundy domaine, he has spread his wings to two more continents. In 2017, he committed himself to establishing wine operations in Santa Barbara County in southern California and, even more exotically, in Hokkaido, the large northern island that is home to Japan’s ski country.

This is quite an act of faith for a European as wine-growing is still pretty difficult in Japan. Neither the climate nor the landscape are obviously hospitable to the grapevine. Monsoons are a regular phenomenon from June to October, encouraging the fungal diseases to which vines are so prone. Growers have to resort to all sorts of ploys to protect their grapes from rot and mildew, including providing individual bunches with their own little waterproof umbrellas — an expensive measure learnt from those who grow top-quality eating grapes in Japan. The majority of vines are trained in overhead pergolas, forming a canopy. This helps protect grapes from rain damage but also encourages eye-wateringly high yields. Many of the best vines are trained on wires with yields limited in order to maximise flavour.

And then there is the scarcity of available potential vineyard land in such a crowded country. This perhaps explains why so much wine and grape concentrate is imported. Wine made from concentrate and bottled in Japan is nearly five times more common than wine grown in Japan. (The nomenclature is interesting: wine produced and bottled in Japan, using only grapes harvested there, is labelled Japan Wine. Wine using imported ingredients is labelled Domestically Produced Wine.)

Most wine enterprises making Japan wine are tiny, with by far the majority of wine producers making only a few thousand cases of wine a year, from vines typically grown on small, leased plots. This makes it all the more extraordinary that winegrowing has become so popular. The number of producers has somehow doubled to about 500 in the past 10 years.

The warmest south of the country is generally too wet for successful grape-ripening and the three leading prefectures for viticulture are all further north: Yamanashi just west of Tokyo, Nagano west of Yamanashi, which benefits from some higher vineyards, and the biggest prefecture of all, the island of Hokkaido in the far north.

De Montille told me that his interest was piqued on a 2015 visit to Japan. “I was touched by the resilience, determination and humility of winemakers trying to do their best in a very challenging environment . . . Some of them said that it could be helpful if some foreign wine estates could come and establish a vineyard in Japan so as to share knowledge and experience, and build bridges.”

He now has 15ha of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with 2023 the first tiny harvest, and a winery in Hakodate. “We are very hopeful that Hokkaido can produce some beautiful, fragrant, elegant, ethereal wines that have a distinctive ‘umami’ type of finish that I have not yet tasted anywhere else,” he wrote in an email.

Most of Hokkaido’s vineyards are in the south of the island — so far — and there’s more potential land available there than on Japan’s main landmass.

In this humid climate, hybrid vine varieties that are better equipped to resist fungal diseases are popular with growers. The most common red-wine variety by far is the rather winning, strangely named Muscat Bailey A, a hybrid created in Japan that produces attractively fruity wines that can smell quite strawberry like.

Rather more white wine is grown in Japan than red. Niagara and Delaware pale-skinned American hybrids are relatively widely planted, but the most popular white-wine grape by far is the Japanese pink-skinned Koshu, which is also grown for the table. No one is quite sure how this cross between a member of the European Vitis vinifera species and a Chinese species of wild vine ended up in Japan several centuries ago. It makes rather neutral, refined dry whites that seem to me to go especially well with sashimi because they can have a similar purity, but there has been a move to imbue the wines with more flavour by reducing yields.

When in Japan recently, I asked several people in the know to ensure that I tasted as many handpicked Japan wines as possible. The best whites by quite a stretch were two Yamanashi Koshus from 98WINEs, which proved, for the first time in my experience, that top quality Koshu can age. One was a 2022, the other a 2019.

The other white wine that impressed me was a convincingly varietal Albariño from eight-year-old vines made by Shun Tamukai of Says Farm. Presumably Galicia’s Albariño has been chosen by several Japanese winegrowers because of the grapes’ thick skins and good resistance to heavy rainfall. I enjoyed both the 2022 and 2023 vintages.

Rather to my surprise, however, I was if anything more impressed by the reds than the whites in a tasting organised jointly by wine writer Hijiri Inose and wine trade veteran Motoko Ishii.

The Muscat Bailey As were generally very charming even if not particularly suitable for long-term cellaring. And I tasted three fine Hokkaido Pinot Noirs, including the 2020 from de Montille made from bought-in fruit, a less subtle but seminal one from Takahiko Soga and another from Chitose winery, the newish Hokkaido operation of the Misawa family of Grace Wine in Yamanashi.

But perhaps the single most ambitious, if not desperately distinctive, red I encountered was a 2021 Bordeaux blend from Manns, one of only a few substantial wine producers in Japan. It was made by Teppei Nishihata, who trained in Bordeaux and Burgundy after studying at Yamanashi university. He managed to fully ripen Cabernet Sauvignon as well as Merlot grapes in Nagano prefecture. Nowadays reds can reach 14 per cent alcohol, even in Japan.

At my tasting in Tokyo, he expressed concern that the brand name chosen for Manns’ top bottlings, Solaris, is also the name of a white-wine hybrid grape that is becoming popular in northern Europe and could be confusing. Since he obviously had a cosmopolitan outlook and experience, I asked him by email after my visit what were the chief differences between wine production in Japan and Europe.

“The difficulty with winemaking in Japan is the lack of standards,” he answered. “We don’t yet know which grape varieties are best-suited to each region. And there are no limits on yields, which makes it difficult to work that out.” He also complained of a lack of specialist vineyard and cellar equipment and pointed out that vineyard land is 10 times more expensive than in France. “But I don’t think negatively about the various climates across Japan,” he added. “These are some of the factors that give a wine its character. We can take on any challenge!”

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drinking dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com
Only 0.02 per cent of Japan wine is exported

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