Japan

Asia

A humid, mountainous country that grows one pink grape into a very precise white wine.

Japan is a difficult place to grow wine grapes. The summer is hot and extremely humid, the rainy season and typhoon season both fall in the growing season, and fungal disease pressure is severe. Vines are often trained on an overhead pergola, the tana system, to keep fruit away from the wet ground and let air move through.

Koshu is the answer to that. It is a pink-skinned variety of the vinifera family with some Chinese wild-vine ancestry, grown in Yamanashi for at least eight hundred years, with a thick skin that resists rot. It makes a pale, light, low-alcohol dry white with subtle citrus and a faintly bitter finish, and its restraint is the point: it is built for the food it grows up with. Koshu was registered with the OIV in 2010, which allowed it to be exported to the EU under its own name.

Muscat Bailey A, a 1927 crossing, is the main red. Japanese Wine as a legal term has only meant wine made in Japan from Japanese-grown grapes since a 2018 labelling rule; before that, wine bottled in Japan from imported bulk could carry the same description.

What the label says

Japanese Wine日本ワイン
Since the 2018 labelling rule, this term requires Japanese-grown grapes vinified in Japan.
GIGeographical Indication
Yamanashi was the first, in 2013, followed by Hokkaido, Yamagata, Nagano and Osaka.

Signature grapes

our choice

Key regions

1 records
  • Yamanashi
  • Nagano
  • Hokkaido
  • Yamagata
  • Iwate
  • Osaka

A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.

Grapes that originate here

4 of 5

Worth knowing

  • Koshu is pink-skinned but makes white wine.
  • Japanese Wine on a label has meant Japanese-grown fruit only since 2018.
  • Overhead pergola training keeps fruit out of the humidity.

More in Asia

Sources

The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).