Yamanashi, Japan
Yamanashi is Japan's wine capital in every measurable sense: home to over 90 wineries and responsible for approximately 30% of all domestic Japanese wine production, it holds Japan's oldest viticultural history and its most prestigious wine geographical indication. And it earned all of that on the back of a single grape that exists almost nowhere else on earth.
Grape cultivation in Yamanashi dates to 718 AD in the mountain town of Katsunuma, where the indigenous Koshu grape was first cultivated. According to local legend, a well-respected monk named Gyōki had a dream of Bhaisajyaguru — the Buddha of healing and medicine — who was holding a bunch of grapes, which prompted cultivation of the vine. The Koshu grape's actual origins are more prosaic but equally interesting: it's now known to be a natural hybrid of Europe's Vitis vinifera and one or more East Asian Vitis species, most likely arriving in Japan via the Silk Road through China over centuries of gradual eastward migration.
For nearly a thousand years, Koshu was grown primarily as a table fruit. Winemaking in Japan didn't properly begin until the Meiji era (1868–1912), when the government — keen to modernize and create products equal to Western goods — actively pushed wine production as an alternative to rice-based alcohol. In 1877, two agronomists of the Dai-nihon Yamanashi Winery, Masanari Takano and Tatsunori Tsuchiya, were sent to France to learn how to make wine, returning three years later with the knowledge that shaped Japan's entire early wine industry. The winery they helped build eventually became Château Mercian, one of the most well-known wine brands in Japan today.
The geography that makes Yamanashi work is the same geography that makes it Japan's biggest fruit-producing prefecture. The Koshu Valley is an alluvial plain in the northwest of Yamanashi Prefecture, framed by the Japanese Alps to the north and Mount Fuji to the south, with well-drained volcanic soils of clay, gravel, and silt — ground that was poor for rice but turned out to be excellent for grapes. The Kofu Basin records the most sunshine hours of any region in Japan, with significant diurnal temperature variation ideal for aromatic ripening, and annual rainfall is far lower than most Japanese regions thanks to the rain-shadow effect of the surrounding mountains.
GI Yamanashi, awarded in July 2013, was the first official Geographical Indication for wine in all of Japan — Yamanashi leading the country's wine credentialing, just as it led its wine history
