Recently my wife and I headed out to Katsunuma City in Yamanashi prefecture for a winery hopping event. My wife had learned of it via a friend who had recently done it. It wasn’t cheap–¥7,000 per person, plus another ¥5,000 or so for train fare—but it was a fun event, with warm and sunny weather and the chance to a bit of winery touring.
I started doing winery visits in Oregon back in 1977, I believe, at a time when there were so few wineries that I knew all of the wine makers (there are hundreds of wineries today). I have also toured Napa Valley in California several times, and once spent a couple of days riding bicycles around in Alsace, France. This was my first time to do it in Japan, although we tried last year during a visit to the area but none were open due to the pandemic. This would also be my first winery tour mostly on foot, meaning I didn’t want to buy too many bottles to carry home in my back pack.
The event, sponsored by the local government, included the chance to visit some thirty-five wineries, some with free, but small, tastings, and others with more ample servings for a small tasting fee. Buses were running every thirty minutes in loops going both to the right and to the left of Katsunuma Budōkyō (grape village) Station. As it turned out, we ended up riding the buses only three times, walking between wineries the rest of the time.
Our first stop was at Marusan Winery. It was also the most fun of the day. There were free pours of perhaps ten different wines, plus fried satsuma imo being cooked by an older woman. There was also a DJ playing music, and a small trailer with food from Sun King Café, a local place apparently frequented by Dead Heads (fans of the American band The Grateful Dead) and other rock n’ rollers. A guy who seemed to be the owner of the café was mixing lemon chū-hai cocktails had on a Grateful Dead t-shirt with a design I had never seen before. He had only attended one Dead show, in Seattle in 1995, a show I was also at. Not having eaten much for breakfast, we ordered the café’s garlic shrimp, which were quite tasty.
Following the hand drawn map we were given, we headed down a narrow road that led to a slope to who knows where. Just down a windy road down the cliff below the main road above where we found Katsunuma Wine Village, A collection of wineries apparently making wine using their own equipment, save for, what I guessed, was a shared bottling line. We sampled a few wines in very small plastic cups, then moved over a couple places to a table with wine as well as their own craft tonic water, Kizashi. Which is why they also had a pretty good selection of Japanese craft gins. My tonic water loving wife wanted to wait until she could make a furusato tax deductible donation to get a case of the tonic for free, but I went ahead and bought one bottle while there. They also had a craft ginger ale, and one more non-alcoholic mixer (their tonic water is served at Ritz Carlton Hotels in Japan). I also bought a bottle of merlot. One of the other wineries had free yakitori if you paid for a small cup of wine, which we did. This time the wine was served in a plastic wine goblet rather than just a small plastic cup, which by now we had acquired quite a few. It seemed like no one wanted to refill the cups, even if it was rinsed with water.
After walking another ten minutes or so we reached Kuramobon Winery where, for ¥500, we were able to get an actual glass wine glass with a pour. The winery seemed old, or at least the garden and buildings looked quite old, with a wisteria tree that may have been 200 years old that we sat under and sipped some wine and ate a small cheese platter. From there it was on to the Mercion winery and museum, which was interesting. The old wooden wine vats looked the same as old miso vats. I am pretty sure they were made by the same craftsmen who mad did indeed make miso tanks.
One of the better wineries was next, Fuji Clair. My wife and I had always started off with a small bottle of their sparkling every time we go to Kohaku, the Michelin three-star modern kaiseki restaurant in Kagurazaka. I say had always started off with a bottle because there is no more available. We had a couple tastes of a non-varietal sparkling in the parking lot, poured into our real glasses. I went into the shop and bought a bottle of their sparkling chardonnay for around ¥3,000, then went back outside to sip some more while waiting for the bus to pull in and take us down the road to Grace Winery.
I wanted to visit Grace because I was aware that their wine maker—a woman—had successfully hybridized the local native Koshu grape to improve its wine making quality. Alas, none of that particular wine was available, not for sale or tasting. I think the staff were a bit surprised that I was aware of their hybrid grapes when I inquired about it. I ended up buying a bottle of a different white, then headed towards MGV winery while my wife took a bus to an onsen for a soak.
Because the weather was so nice we really didn’t need to use the buses, except for leaving the station after arriving and later returning to the station to go back to Tokyo.
It was nice walking along roads lined with brightly colored grape leaves that looked like a vast and wide orange and red and yellow quilt due to the way the grapes are cultivated trellis-like—flat and wide, rather than in rows. We did take one other ride, a fairly long trip later in the day, and my wife rode again to the Katsunuma Wine Cave for an onsen soak. I imagine if it had been raining we would have bused it a lot more. And if so, we would have needed to time our winery visits with the bus schedule, which would mean in most cases one hour to visit two wineries close to each other, or thirty minutes for a single winery.
While it was all in all a fun time, there were a few things in need of improvement. First off, there was not much in the way of food available. Two of the places we visited had some food trucks or similar yatai, including one at Fuji Clair Winery serving grilled saba and kamaboko on bagels, which we both ate. There was also gelato there, but otherwise most of the food was sold out. I guess next year we should remember to bring our own snacks along, like we saw quite a few other people doing.
Secondly, we wondered what became of the ¥7,000 we each paid for a wristband, which nobody checked and would have been unseen if people were wearing jackets. Part of the money obviously went to pay for the buses. But there was no evidence of anything else. I suspect each participating winery received enough money to pay for the free samples of wine they poured, as well as the plastic cups the wine was poured into. And for those who were able to find one, there were nice wine glasses for only ¥500, which included a nice pour of wine (refills were only ¥200). One idea we came up with to make it more obvious where the money goes is to give everyone some tickets for paid tastings, even if the price of admission needed to be raised.
The final thing needing improvement was the use of single pour plastic cups, most of which were very small. Giving everyone a glass wine glass and a glass holster to hang around your neck would be much less wasteful, and provide everyone with something to take home.