In Katsunuma the vines grow above your head. Koshu hangs from head-high pergolas, its long, pinkish-grey bunches in the shade of a roof of leaves. The arrangement is old, and it is an answer to the weather: it keeps the grapes off the wet ground and lets the air move through them in a summer that is warm and humid. Katsunuma, today part of the city of Koshu, lies on an alluvial fan at the eastern edge of the Kofu basin, 400 to 600 metres up, with Mount Fuji on the southern horizon and the Southern Alps to the west, west of Tokyo beyond the mountains.
A grape from the Silk Road
Koshu is a Vitis vinifera with a pink skin, and genetics has given the local legends a frame: it is probably a natural cross of the European vine with East Asian wild vines, made somewhere along the Silk Road before the grape reached Japan; legend has it found at Katsunuma in the 8th or the 12th century. Wine came with the Meiji era: in 1877 a company of Katsunuma growers sent two young men, Takano Masanari and Tsuchiya Ryuken, to Troyes in France to learn the trade. In 2010 the OIV registered Koshu, the first Japanese variety on its list. The prefecture’s red is Muscat Bailey A, bred in 1927 by Kawakami Zenbei in Niigata from the American Bailey and Muscat Hamburg: a light, soft red smelling of strawberries. Chardonnay and Merlot grow too, though Merlot belongs above all to neighbouring Nagano.
In the glass
The grapes the region is known for, by sweetness, acidity, tannin and body.
| Grape | Sweetness | Acidity | Tannin | Body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chardonnay | dry | medium to high | white, no tannin | medium(−) to full |
| Merlot | dry | medium(−) to medium | medium(−) to medium(+) | medium to full |
Each grape’s typical range worldwide, not in this region alone, on the WSET tasting grid (Level 3, 2022): dry to luscious, low to high, light to full. The dot before each name shows the colour of a typical bottle.
Mountains on every side
Japan is a wet country, and Yamanashi is one of its driest corners. Mountains ring the basin, Fuji, the Southern Alps, Yatsugatake and the Chichibu range, and they shield it: Kofu gets about 1,160 millimetres of rain a year and over 2,200 hours of sunshine, drier and sunnier than the coasts. The rain that comes arrives badly, though: typhoons bring September and October showers at harvest, which is why the pergola and Koshu’s thick skin matter; the growers of the Shandong peninsula fight the same monsoon summer. In 2013 ‘Yamanashi’ became Japan’s first geographical indication for wine, and since 2018 only wine made entirely from grapes grown in Japan may be called Japan wine. About a third of it is made in Yamanashi, by more than eighty wineries, over thirty of them in Katsunuma, from about 650 hectares of wine grapes; the prefecture’s roughly 3,800 hectares of vines are mostly Kyoho and Shine Muscat for the table.
Sense of scale
650 ha Yamanashi has about 5 % of the Swiss vineyard.
One square is all of Switzerland: about 14,350 hectares of vines.
Sushi, tempura, Koshu
Koshu is a wine of understatement: pale, light, with yuzu and white peach, a faintly bitter, saline finish and an alcohol level that often stays below 12 per cent. It was made for the table it grew up beside, sashimi, sushi, tempura and grilled fish, at 8 to 10 degrees; Muscat Bailey A, lightly chilled to about 14 degrees, suits yakitori in sweet tare sauce or nikujaga. Like Swiss wine, Japan wine is almost all drunk at home; Koshu is the first bottle to have begun to travel.