Japan Navigator

“Japanese wine” is not an expression to bring joy to faces and make mouths water. I still remember the not-even-so-cheap head-ache stuff I drank when I first came to Japan, more than 25 years ago, and although things have improved a lot, Japan will never be a great wine country. Not because the Japanese can’t make wine – on the contrary, there are many young wine makers who have studied abroad and who are enthusiastically producing some good stuff at small wineries – but the problems are the following:

1. Climatic conditions for the growing of grapes are not good (too humid).
2. There are no vinefera vines native to Japan, although several as the Koshu have been brought here many centuries ago and evolved in a unique way. But the Koshu is a typical table grape, wine made with it lacks body.
3. Grape-growers (who are separate from the wineries) concentrate on table grapes as these command a far higher price than the variety used in winemaking.
4. There is the habit among the larger producers to blend Japanese wines with foreign ones – this does not have to be indicated on the label.

[Daizenji temple, Katsunuma, Yamanashi. Photo Ad Blankestijn]

Wine cultivation in Japan is legendarily linked with Daizenji Temple in Katsunuma, the main grape and wine producing area of the country in Yamanashi Prefecture. The Healing Buddha installed in the temple hall is believed to have brought grapes with medical properties to Katsunuma. And it were the grapes the ancient Japanese were interested in, rather than wine – wine consumption is not documented until the arrival of the Portuguese missionaries in the 16th c.

That wine was called “Tinta-shu,” after the Portuguese word for red, tinto, and it was presented to Japan’s feudal lords, although presumably the missionaries drank most of it themselves. When Japan secluded itself from the world a few decades later, wine was forgotten (if it had made a dent at all) and we have to wait until 1875 before the first attempts at commercial wine making were undertaken on Japanese soil. These were not very successful; the taste was too sour and tannic to suit the Japanese. But the experiment led to the import of European vinifera and American vines as the basis for a new industry.

The first popular wine was manufactured by Suntory in 1907. Called “Akadama Port,” it was not really a wine, but rather a cocktail of grape juice, alcohol, flavorings and sugar. It was very sweet, but suited the Japanese taste of that time. Also the sake drunk in the Meiji period was rather sweet.

[1922 Akadama poster from Wikipedia]

Wine drinking doubled in the 1990s but is still low (though stable) at 4 liters per capita – on the other hand, this is by far the highest consumption in Asia. There are 175 (mostly tiny) domestic wineries in 36 prefectures and domestic sales account for about 36% of sales (2004 figures). This is down from a three-quarters share in 1983.

Japan’s vinicultural industry is still in the first place focused on producing table grapes, rather than great raw materials for wine making. Only one-tenth of the 230,000 tons of grape produced each year goes into wine making. It is difficult to grow grapes in Japan as the weather is too humid. Therefore budodana, overhead wires or platforms are used to expose the grapes to air circulation. Katsunuma is popular because it is a relatively dryer area. Other important areas are Nagano and Yamagata, as well as central Hokkaido, which has no monsoon problems but is on the other hand extremely cold for grape growing.

There are no vinefera vines truly native to Japan, although several have been introduced and evolved in such a unique way that they can be called “Japanese.” The most important variety of these is the Koshu, which is an excellent table grape, brought to Japan 1200 years ago along the Silk Road. A wild vine (yamabudo) found in Hokkaido, has been subject to development in the 60s and has been crossed with other varieties to produce larger and richer grapes. Used in wine, it has very little body. Most other vines used are hybrids as Kyoho and Delaware.

Grapes that fail to satisfy requirements as table grapes or that ripen late in season usually end up at wineries for the lower priced local labels.

[Katsunuma in winter, photo by Ad Blankestijn]

The domestic industry has tried to hold its own against foreign wines by using not only imported grapes, but also (more conveniently) imported bulk wine, grape concentrate and must. Labeling laws are (too) lax: as long as some local wine finds its way into the bottle, the rest may be foreign and the wine can still be labeled as a domestic brand!

Happily, the last ten years smaller wineries have stopped this bad habit and are concentrating on lifting the quality of their domestic product. Regional certification systems have been introduced to demonstrate that their wine is 100% from domestic grapes, grown, fermented and bottled in Japan. But these wineries often do not have their own vineyard or only a small one for experimental purposes. They are still dependant on grape-growers who can earn more by producing table grapes (four times as much). Some European grapes as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot have been planted recently, but these take up still less than 1% of total grape production.

As in the sake world, it are a few big labels who dominate the wine world (Mercian, Suntory, Sapporo, Manns (Kikkoman) and Asahi). These are improving in quality (Mercian stopped blending its more expensive wines in 2002), although the cheaper labels still have foreign produce mixed in. These cheap bottles are rather terrible: they taste as badly sweet as their prices are nicely “sweet.” For the best wines in Japan one has to go to the smaller family-owned wineries, again as in the sake world. Some examples of wineries who have a high reputation for quality are: Obuse Domaine Sogga, Hayashi Noen and Izutsu from Nagano, Domaine Takeda from Yamagata, Okuizumo from Shimane, Coco Farm from Tochigi and Kuzumaki from Iwate. But again, after tasting several of these wines, I have to say that most of them still lack body compared to foreign wines. That seems to be a lasting problem in Japan.

For this article information was used from the The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition“. See also these Japan Times articles: Japanese wine: unadulterated and ready to go abroad and Japanese wine catching up to its competitors.