Postcards from the Vineyard: What I Learned from Touching Grass in Rural Japan

Ah, harvest season.

It's quite a romantic idea isn't it?

Being one with nature, feeling the grapes in your hands and a cool breeze against your back...that is, until you walk face first into a spiderweb bigger than your face.

The offending spider in question.

For the third year in a row, I found myself in the fields again during Japan's harvest season, which contrary to popular belief, can be quite a hostile environment at times.

Creepy crawlies aside, it was hot this year - actually hotter than it's ever been - and still humid. These conditions provide the perfect breeding ground for fungal diseases, which means spending even more time in the heat of the vineyards, picking off diseased berries before they get put in baskets to avoid contamination.

Not so romantic anymore is it?

Yikes.

At times it poured, other times the ground baked under the intense heat, yet we soldiered on with our 'shoganai' attitude and some cold tea.

I suppose a certain amount of emotional detachment is required to make wines in a climate so inhospitable to grapes, and perhaps with it comes a degree of mental clarity - just pick, sort, and do what you can with what you get.

That's also made it a lot easier to understand why Japanese wine typically commands a premium over wines from elsewhere in the world - yields are low, and the work is labour-intensive.

In a way, Japan's geography feels a lot like a tasting flight in itself - the climate, and by extension wine styles gradually evolve from the warm and humid South to the cool and less-humid North. As you might expect, the South has the short end of the stick climate-wise and thus hasn't progressed as quickly as Hokkaido in winemaking.

Yet, people persist, and it's because of this that there are some incredible vineyard adaptations that have emerged across these regions.

A Semillon vine sprouting aerial roots in response to the excess moisture in the air.

Yes, those are actually massive Merlot vines growing in what is essentially a greenhouse.

Weird and wacky doesn't always mean palatable, but this time we had a bunch of wines from the South that absolutely slap. Chenin Blanc and Kyoho from Fukuoka, Merlot from Miyazaki, Sangiovese from Okayama; there's so much already going on that it was honestly tough to keep up!

More importantly, a lot of it was completely outside of the realm of what we're familiar with, and truly felt like an evolution of the Japanese wine identity.

Case in point: a white wine from Tottori prefecture, made using mountain grapes.

This was all very esoteric, boundary-pushing stuff, but it certainly made us think.

We believe that for Japanese wine to stand out in such a crowded industry, it should lean into its own identity—with all the challenges that entails—rather than walking in others’ footsteps, and most of all, make each sip feel like a story only Japan could tell.