New World
Japan wine
A humid, monsoon-affected country making delicate white wine from Koshu, a variety grown almost nowhere else.
Overview
Japanese viticulture is shaped almost entirely by humidity. Rain arrives when the vines are growing, and the traditional pergola training system exists to keep fruit off the ground and in moving air.
Koshu is the variety that matters: a pink-skinned vinifera grape with some Vitis davidii ancestry, grown in Japan for around a thousand years, whose thick skins let it survive conditions that would rot a thinner-skinned variety.
The wine is very light, low in alcohol and deliberately subtle — a quality that is genuinely suited to Japanese food and genuinely difficult to sell on a shelf full of louder wine.
Japanese labelling law was tightened in 2018 so that "Japanese Wine" may only be used for wine made from domestically grown grapes; before that, wine made in Japan from imported bulk could carry the same description.
The rainy season and the typhoon season both fall inside the growing season, making fungal disease rather than ripening the dominant problem. Overhead pergola training exists to lift fruit clear of humid ground.
Regions
Wines
Grapes grown here
Sources
Sources consulted