Wine in Japan

On this page, I would like to write about Japanese wine, if you love wines, please look it over.

• Climate in Japan
• The Wine Law
• The Quality of Wine
• Additive-Free Wine
• Good Wineries

Climate in Japan

The environment for growing the grapes is so important to make nice wine. It isn't easy to grow good grapes for wine by the fact that it's so hard to increase the sugar content in Japan. For the reason, Japanese grapes can't condense much and then it's difficult to harvest fully rape grapes.

So, Japanese wines have the features, which is easy to drink in good word or weak wine in bud expression. On the other hands, Japanese wineries need special brewing to make the nice wine with condensation taste and high alcoholicity, so the price of the bottle would be expensive.

In additionally, good grapes would be for the wines in wine advanced nations, but Japanese wine made with bad remainder grapes that they can't ship by the low quality.

The Wine Law

There isn't The Wine Law in Japan. It makes easy to find a lot of fake wines or the wine like the fake wines in comparison to wine advanced countries.

Japan has only the Liquor Tax Low and it just decide the tax and it doesn't affect the wine qualities. So the quality of Japanese wine is still developing in comparison to Sake and Shochu have developed by the efforts of the Sake brewery recently.

Actuary, if Japanese wineries directly took the standards of the productions of wine advanced countries to Japan, Japanese winery couldn't run their brewing wines by the quality of the grape and they also totally understand the fact.

The Quality of Wine

The reason of the low quality wine depends on Japanese grape, which doesn't include enough sugar content. If the sugar content isn't enough, the wineries need chaptalization to make it up for the lack.

The alcoholicity of wine would be from eight percent to nine percent by the sugar content of the grapes at Japanese environment. Maybe, you also don't think the alcoholicity is enough, do you? So they need to add sucrose or glucose. By the way, French low approve chaptalization with the upper limit, but Japan doesn't have any low and they can chaptalize unlimitedly. And chaptalization is prohibited except France and some parts of Germany.

The sugared water makes grape juice thinner, and it also makes the vinegary taste be weaker and they need to add vinegary taste.

Finally, they might make the unbalanced and unnatural wine that have the dark color added juice or colored with, the weak fragrance by sugar water, high alcoholicity by the chaptalization and acid taste by adding vinegary taste.

Additive-Free Wine

We can find a lot of additive-free wine called "Mutenka Wine" at Japanese supermarkets. At first it would sound healthy by the word "additive-free". But it might be the worst wine in Japan.

Some wineries imported the grape juice boiled to stop the fermentation while shipping from other countries, and then they add the ferments, which we originally don't need, to the boiled juice. And they make their wine with cheap grape juices and chaptalizations and vinegary taste.

The addictive-free wine means the wine, which they originally can't sell by the low quality, and add a lot of sugar content and vinegary tastes and tannins to make it sound healthy and easy to drink.

If you want to understand the features, I would like to recommend you to try an addictive-free wine sold around 1,000 yen in Japanese supermarkets and Australian wine or New Zealand wine sold at same price in same time. Maybe you would find the facts, which are dark color and weak or too conspicuous fragrance, it would be made with adding some other wines or juices reconstituted from concentrated fruit juice before the shipping. And it's also the features of addictive-free wine that we can find the bad balances with too better or sour taste. If we feel the sticky sweet, it's also one of the features.

But, I had a lot of addictive-free wines before stayed at Canada even if I wrote above.　At that time, I actually felt so sweet taste that I could say fruity taste like grape juice in really good words. And now I can guess the wine included a lot of juices.

Good Wineries

Some of Japanese wineries brew the nice wines with only Japanese grapes even if we can't say, "Japanese environments are good for wine". If you want to try true Japanese wines, I think the below wineries are so good when I correct the information about wineries in Japan on website.

Finally I need to write the fact. When every grape was complete annihilated before in Bordeaux. At that time, California grapes and Nagano, which is Japanese city and it's famous in Winter Olympics, grapes sent to France. By the fact, I hope that some of Japanese wines are so nice.