Japan Annual Report: Nurturing an Identity, One Wine at a Time

In the mid-2000s, my experience with Japanese wine was largely one of sweet “omiyage wine,” as producer Takahiko Soga calls the cloying, “pasteurized expressions that still pervade the gift-giving culture.” Much of this ilk is rendered with imported grapes, must or concentrate. This was juxtaposed against wines so bland that they failed to excite, and others that were often pallid interpretations of European styles, littered with ersatz chateaux names and an incomprehensible hash of Japanese phonetics and foreign nomenclature on their labels. While these idioms still exist, things have changed radically in Japan for the better.

My visit to Japan for JamesSuckling.com was my first since pre-pandemic days. I had lived in rural Japan in my teens as an exchange student, and returned in 2001, becoming a Master of Wine in 2010 and staying in the country until 2014. But I continued to visit a few times each year after moving to Australia for its blue skies, open space and good waves. My goal on this occasion was to discover and document as many interesting Japanese wines as possible. While I tasted around 220, tasting notes become more impactful when given a cultural context, the aim of this report.

Wine growing began in Japan just over 140 years ago under the Meiji government as a means to encourage fresh industry. Vines were first planted in Katsunuma, in Yamanashi prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, in 1874. Today there are more than 300 wineries in Japan. While Yamanashi remains the most widely recognized Japanese wine region and is responsible for around 33 percent of the country’s crush, it is arguably limited by the neutrality of its pink-skinned, big-berried flagship variety, koshu. While local growers have made it their own and cite it as vinifera, research indicates that it was born partly of a wild variety from southern China and is thus a hybrid.

As a side note, 2022 in Hokkaido was a vintage defined by peripatetic weather patterns and millerandage as a consequence. While this served to concentrate the fruit and service more phenolic amplitude due to a greater solids-to-juice ratio in the grapes, the yields were parsimonious, verging on uneconomical. Elsewhere in Japan, things ran a little more smoothly, although rain throughout harvest and searing heat and humidity, often inhospitable to grape growing, were omnipresent as usual.

It would be easy to say that I was surprised by the quality of Japanese wine during my recent visit. But I was not. After all, Japanese culture has long ebbed between self-imposed isolation and the inherent ethnocentricity that it fuels, and an embrace of assiduously selected aspects of foreign cultures, exported and appropriated back home in an idiosyncratic fashion.

The indelible impression I got was of a wine culture trying to find a distinctive voice. After all, wine styles in Japan are many, ranging from the conventional and relatively mainstream, to those that are distinctly minimalist, highly expressive and unfettered in a giddy, eminently drinkable fashion. “Chaos” might be a better description of the Japanese wine scene today, yet it is a distinctly joyous and effusive kind.

Grape varieties on offer include chardonnay, pinot gris, sauvignon blanc and kerner, together with pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, zweigelt and merlot – the latter a variety that performs particularly well in propitious pockets of Nagano, often in the hands of larger players such as Chateau Mercian across a range of single vineyards. The feel is one of levity, poise and drinkability, rather than overt fleshiness or obvious power. Japanese wine in a nutshell, perhaps.

Japan's regular rain also necessitates disease-resistant hybrids and labruscas including muscat bailey A, the local warhorse koshu, concord, Muller-Thurgau, Delaware and niagara, a variety so aromatic that walking beneath its pergolas is like entering a parfumerie! The quality of the non-vinifera wines is mostly modest, with the exception of certain interpretations of koshu that are given either extended time on lees, skin contact, judicious oak or all of the above. For example, the 98 Wines Yamanashi Sabi 2013 is an example of skin-inflected brininess and leesy aged depth, the Aruga Branca Yamanashi Clareza Sur Lie Distincta Mente 2022 of extended lees handling, and the MGV Koshu Yamanashi K2 2020 of sensitive oak use.

The quality and availability of planting material in Japan is still discombobulated, adding to the laissez-faire spirit. While there are more than 20 nurseries, they are not specialized, selling planting materials other than grape vines. Clonal choice is also limited and the virus-checking regime is yet to be fully developed.

A POSTCODE OF AUTHENTICITY

From chaos, however, comes order. Or better put in the context of something as abstract as wine, a postcode of authenticity that the Japanese can call their own. For a start, the movement emphasizing wine made only from Japanese grapes is so strong that no serious drinker, sommelier or restaurateur would consider vying for anything else. There are also forceful ideologies helping to nurture an identity, even if they can feel like incantations made up on the run, drawing on that inveterate hand that the Japanese deal a little too often, cultural exceptionalism. Perhaps this is the reason that so few have worked in more established regions elsewhere.

Yet we are, after all, storytellers. Wine is a novel of many pages, some truthful and others apocryphal. Ultimately, it is a rousing tale that matters, and in Hokkaido’s collegiate hotbed of creativity in the hinterland of Yoichi, Domaine Takahiko’s Takahiko Soga has plenty! His eponymous domaine verges on cult status at home and is creating waves, too, in certain markets abroad. The winery project of Burgundy’s Domaine De Montille is not too far away in Hakodate, yet the real hustle is in Yoichi, at least for now. Soga speaks of wines that “smell like temple moss” and soft water as “the foundation” of his soft wine style. Those who have worked alongside, making Yoichi their home, share a similar language.

Soga is 51 years, having accreted much of his experience while working with the American godfather of Japanese wine, Bruce Gutlove at Coco Farms in Tochigi prefecture, after studying oenology at Tokyo University of Agriculture.

Surprisingly, as with other winemakers in these parts, Soga has not worked abroad. Yet this has not tempered the narrative he derives from his 4.6 hectares, and the 550mm of annual rainfall that seeps into the volcanic soils, sand and gravel. This is water that is as responsible for the forest mushrooms with which dashi is made as it is inadvertently for the soft tannins that frame his wines.

“This is soft water, which is good for dashi,” he explained. “Tannins make dashi taste bitter, and the softness of my wines is designed to work with Japanese cuisine in its own way.”

While this is true, I couldn’t help but pine for a bit more bite and textural complexity. This said, the longer extractions necessary to glean additional tannins would surely prove risqué in lieu of the fungal disease pressures in such a wet place.

From Soga’s perspective, a pulpiness, spark of volatility and notes of dried mushroom, sassafras and a medicinal waft of camphor that I began to associate with incense in the spirit of things, find confluence with the Japanese culinary rubric and its cradle of umami. Yet while his Nana-Tsu-Mori Pinot Noir 2021 is good, I preferred the zweigelt and pinot noir blend that he calls “rosé” because of the tannin. While not a rosé by hue, it is a lightish red of crunch and sap, stylistically interchangeable and best enjoyed chilled.

Yuichirou Yamada of Yamadado winery, a Soga acolyte, also makes a red “rosé” – on this occasion from straight pinot noir and a similar mien. Drawing the 2022 from barrel for me to taste, Yamada suggested that the tannins are a little too forceful. Conversely, I found structural amplitude that other wines lacked, leading me to question my Western lens. I thought it apt that both Soga and Yamada often cite poulsard from the Jura as stylistic inspiration, rather than the pinot noir with which they work.

Their work is distinctly lo-fi, in tiny cellars that reflect the microplots that define Japanese wine regions. The small plastic blocks used for storage and fermentation at both wineries, however, seemed out of place given the otherwise minimalist creed of whole bunches, ambient yeast and zero tweaking, other than a psychologically alleviating dash of sulphur dioxide at bottling when deemed necessary.

Soga posited that the bins are easily moved around by a single farmer, drawing on Japan’s agrarian roots and tradition of small land holdings and precision work. Similarly, the ebullient Shige Kihara, another former apprentice and owner of neighboring winery Mongaku Valley Winery, champions relatively short macerations because “they fit in with healthier sleep patterns and life-balance,” reflecting the working hours of small farmers of yesteryear.

Influenced by Soga’s regenerative farming practices, Kihara uses oyster shells collected from nearby shores to imbue calcium into the soils, and scallop shells, which are less friable, to assist with drainage. Mongaku Valley Winery specializes in excellent field blends although here, too, I yearned for a bit more textural chomp, both tannin and acidity.

There is, however, depth and structure to be found in Japanese wines, iterated in idiosyncratic ways. Soga and another acolyte-cum-neighbor, ex-professional snowboarder Atsuo Yamanaka of Domaine Mont, craft resinous, deeply complex expressions from botrytized berries, forensically selected. The wines are dry, savory, even powerful, and are frankly unlike anything I’ve tasted before, making them flag-bearers of inimitability, the essence of great wine anywhere.

Koshu lovers may argue otherwise, yet even the very best koshu lack the grandeur that these wines evince. Soga utilizes pinot noir and Yamanaka, pinot gris, the only variety planted in his minuscule vineyard. The Domaine Takahiko Yoichi Hokkaido Nana-Tsu-Mori Blanc de Noir 2020 is a richly flavored wine full of Earl Grey, salted brulee and camphor notes, while the Domaine Mont Pinot Gris Dom Gris 2018 is hewn of extended skin contact and two years in barrel, with tea accents more attuned to darjeeling, salty orange bitters and even ginger. Best, both wines have structure!

My overall impression of better Japanese wine is demarcated: a bunch of Cru Bourgeois prototypes defining the mainstream, and an effortlessly digestible stream of soft, slurpy wines that are of a minimalist cadence, synergistic with Japan’s long love affair with the natural idiom. Obtuse faults were impressively few and the drinkability quotient extremely high. My favorites included 10R wines and their broad textural palettes, 98 Wines, a cracking Nikki Hills Winery Kerner Hokkaido Hatsuyuki 2022 and anything and everything from Nora Kura, Kurisawa Winery and Due Punti.

Admittedly, the Japanese scene is small. It will likely remain that way. Yet it brims with optimism, discoveries and artisanal degrees of intense stimuli.

– Ned Goodwin MW, Senior Editor

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