Japanese wine

Although viticulture and the cultivation of grapes for table consumption has a long history in Japan, domestic wine production using locally produced grapes only really began with the adoption of Western culture during the Meiji restoration in the second half of the 19th century.

According to data from Japan's National Tax Agency for 2017, approximately 382,000 kiloliters of wine was purchased in Japan, of which two-thirds was imported wine. Of the 102,000 kiloliters of wine domestically produced that year, only a fifth came from domestically grown and harvested grapes. The Agency states the share of Japanese wine, as defined as domestically produced wine from domestically grown grapes, as only 4% of total domestic consumption, or 14,988 kiloliters. Only 58 kiloliters of Japanese wine was exported overseas.

The main region for winemaking in Japan is in Yamanashi Prefecture which accounts for approximately a third of domestic production, although grapes are cultivated and wine is also produced in more limited quantities by vintners throughout the country, from Hokkaido in the North to Miyazaki Prefecture on the Southern island of Kyushu.

Grape-growing in Japan began in 718 AD, in Katsunuma, Yamanashi Prefecture. Japan's early viticulture was based on the Koshu grape, thought to be originally from the Georgia caucasus region.

The first regularly documented wine consumption in Japan was however in the 16th century, with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries from Portugal. Saint Francis Xavier brought wines as gifts for the feudal lords of Kyūshū, and other missionaries continued the practice, resulting in locals acquiring taste for wine and importing it regularly. They called the Portuguese wine chintashu (珍陀酒), combining the Portuguese word tinto (chinta in Japanese) meaning red and shu (酒) meaning liquor.

There was a prejudice that Japanese looked at red wine and mistook it for "blood," while Westerners drank "living blood."

A report written in 1869 by Adams, Secretary to the British Legation in Yedo, describes "a quantity of vines, trained on horizontal trellis frames, which rested on poles at a height of 7 or 8 feet from the ground" in the region of Koshu, Yamanashi. It was not until 1873 however, after detailed reports on European wine culture were made available by returning members of the Iwakura Mission, that more focused attempts were made to promote domestic wine production. The first attempt to produce wine locally, using mainly sake brewing equipment, was undertaken by Hironori Yamada and Norihisa Takuma in Kofu, Yamanashi, in 1875. In 1877, the newly formed winery Dai-Nihon Yamanashi Budoshu in Katsunuma, Yamanashi dispatched Masanari Takano and Ryuken Tsuchiya to Troyes in the Champagne region of France to learn viticulture and wine production techniques. The cultivation of European grape varieties formed the core of early Japanese attempts, however the project was all but destroyed in 1884 by an outbreak of Phylloxera that arrived via imported root stock.

In many prefectures a few small scale viniculturists remained, but it was not until after World War II that the scale of winemaking began to grow. However, in comparison to the growth of imported wines and the production of low cost retail wines from imported grape juices, domestically grown and harvested wine still remained at an early stage of development.