Important changes on the Japanese wine scene.
During my visits to Yamanashi and Nagano (report next week), I began to understand not just the climatic challenges of making wine in Japan but also the complicated issues around selling it. My photo shows a typical Yamanashi vineyard: pergola-trained Muscat Bailey A hybrid vines, with Kai-Komagatake ('horse mountain') in the background.
As part of the preparation for my trip, I asked US-born and Davis-trained Bruce Gutlove, who has been running Coco Farm and Winery in Tochigi prefecture just north of Tokyo since the late 1980s, for an insight into the extremely difficult weather patterns faced...