Day 98: Ever Tried Japanese Wine?
Adam and I have been visiting a lot of wineries on this trip and I don't really know much about Japanese wine so we decided to take a trip to Yamanashi (Japan's answer to the Hunter Valley?) and visit a Japanese winery.
I am very into the train design.
About an hour and a half from Tokyo is Yamanashishi, where a bunch of wineries can be found. Shirayuri Winery is one place which offers tours in English if you make a reservation. They were so cute when we arrived – the owner greeted us and spoke a little bit of English and he was super excited that we came all the way to visit his winery. He'd arranged for the winemaker to show us around as she spoke some English.
The grow their vines differently here because they get a lot of rain so this kind of set up is best for their grapes.
Koshu is the typical grape they use.
Japanese grappa, anybody?
We paid to bottle our own wine which involved pouring some wine from a barrel into a blank wine bottle...
... And then designing our own bottle label!
You can select the label you want to design.
After we were done, the owner wanted to get a photo of us so I decided I would too.
Grape covers. They cover all the grapes manually which must take them ages.
We'd heard about this magical place called Buda No Oka where they have an all you can taste wine cave where you can sample around 1000 Japanese wines for ¥1,100.
The tasting dish.
We quickly discovered that Japanese wines aren't really to our taste so what was meant to be a wined up afternoon was actually about 15 minutes of us trying to find a wine we actually liked. No wins there. At least we saw Yone (a kind of well known Japanese photographer) there. That was kind of exciting.
There's snow on those mountains in the background!
Adam actually looks scary in this photo. Scary and about 45.
We finished up just after lunchtime so were able to get to Tokyo before 5pm.
New nails!
Conveniently I was about to book a nail appointment at Fast Nail on the train ride home because my gels had grown out and were looking super weird.
We cooked up a soy nabe for dinner because it's simple, cheap and healthy. A winner on all counts.
The wine we made! W
