Japan has refined the art of many beverages (matcha, sake, whiskey, beer). But until recently, wine did not rank among them, mostly relegated, instead, to suspiciously inexpensive cartons that lined the shelves of convenience stores. But young Japanese winemakers have been popping up across the country since the late aughts, making enticing low-intervention wines like cold-climate reds that lean almost into the umami. U.S. distributors took notice, and the trickle that’s been arriving since 2021 has grown exponentially in the past year. Tsukimi, a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, offers six different Japanese wines that pair with their tasting menu, including a merlot by Mie Ikeno, a journalist who trained as a winemaker in France and has been growing European varieties in Yamanashi, the traditional center of Japanese winemaking just west of Tokyo, since 2007. Tomo, in Seattle, recently poured the 2021 Arancione from Yamagata’s Grape Republic by the glass: an apricot-hued blend of Delaware and Steuben grapes. Wine bars and seafood restaurants with thoughtful bottle lists like Manhattan’s Penny have also caught on. (Its sesame brioche slathered with butter and anchovies pairs well with Coco Farms’s flinty Kumo no Jikan, a sauvignon blanc blend grown near the ocean in Hokkaido that smells, unexpectedly, like lychee.) 10 Green Street, a wine bar within a furniture showroom in Vergennes, Vt., serves Domaine Tetta’s 2022 Aki Queen, a cloudy, candied cantaloupe rosé grown in the limestone soil of Okayama, a prefecture that’s about a three-hour drive west of Kyoto. Domaine Tetta will be visiting Brooklyn alongside other Japanese winemakers on May 14 for a panel discussion and tasting at Bin Bin Sake — a bottle shop with one of the largest Japanese wine selections in the States.
