An introduction to the wines of Hokkaido

8/9/2024

Raj Vaidya

A few weekends ago I had the good fortune to be able to visit the island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan, to attend the inauguration of Etienne de Montille’s shiny new winery in the hills above Hakodate. Etienne found a passion for this area after spending some years visiting sites and tasting wines from around the island, motivated by the belief that it would be possible to produce world class Pinot Noir and Chardonnay here. He told me his senses were awakened by a blind taste of a wine poured for him on a visit to Tokyo, a Pinot Noir from a label called Coco-romi. The wine had all the spice and incense aromas he loves from Pinot Noir, and from then on he was committed to learning the wines of Japan in an effort to see if he could replicate such quality in this old version of the new world.

Etienne set about tasting as many wines and visiting as many wineries as he could, and he came to the conclusion that the warm climate of the main island of Honshu was not ideal for the style of Burgundy varieties he planned to produce. So he started, in 2016, with a small negociant project purchasing grapes from around Hokkaido to come to learn about the nuances of the different growing areas. He found some good Pinot Noir, a fair bit of Kerner and Zweigelt (which, oddly, have a pretty long history of viticulture in Japan) and a plethora of hybrids. Eventually he identified the hills above the small bayside town of Hakodate in the South of Hokkaido as the ideal place to put down roots. He purchased a property which was mainly farmland and started planting Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and has since made the first wines from the estate in 2023 (from 2016 on he’s been buying grapes from the Yoichi region, closer to Sapporo.)

I have had, on previous occasions, some of the negociant Pinot Noir and found it very tasty. But I was truly impressed with the quality of his white and red estate wines from 2023, very elegant and with lovely texture and aromatic complexity. There is tremendous potential here and I’m very much looking forward to following these wines as the project matures and evolves.

Etienne had gathered a fairly large group of Burgundians, some winemakers, some in the wine trade and others enthusiasts, to celebrate the opening of the winery, and so he was kind enough to arrange for us all to taste a big swath of wines from Japan after the celebration. We drove out to the Nikki Hills Winery, a picturesque site in the Yoichi Valley about an hour east of Sapporo, where he had gathered samples from 12 different high quality wineries in Japan, a total of 30 plus wines.

I thought I would share a few of my favorites, described below:

Takahiko Soga Nana-Tsu-Mori Pinot Noir 2019, Yoichi Hills; this was the best example of ‘old world styled’ Pinot Noir from Hokkaido along with Etienne’s 2023, very aromatic, whole-cluster sort of nose with depth of flavor and some really delicious fruit at the core of the palate. This has become something of a cult wine from Japan and is imported into the US in tiny quantities.

Nora-Kura Rouge Zero 2022 and Fumizuki Blanc 2021, Yoichi Hills; this is a winery working in organics and with only native yeasts and no additives, making some of the most compelling wines on the island. Initially, Ken and Kazuko Sasake started producing wines in the Hakodate region, right next door to where Etienne is farming today, and today they’ve moved operations to the Yoichi area. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in a very transparent and fine style, very ‘Burgundian.‘

10R Winery Pinot Noir Mori 2021, Yoichi Valley; This winery is a combination of a custom crush and estate winery founded by Bruce Gutlove, a UC Davis trained American transplant who has been making stellar wines in Japan (first Honshu, now Hokkaido) for 35 years. He is, in Etienne’s mind, the father of the modern, quality minded winemaking style in Japan today, and has mentored nearly all the other vignerons in the country. This Pinot Noir had tremendous depth and salinity, not super common in the country as mostly all the soil is rich and volcanic.

Funny enough, the wine that first turned Etienne on to the quality potential of Japanese wine was a wine that Bruce at 10R made, under the label Coco Farm, the Hokkaido wines from whom are today produced at Bruce’s winery by another team. When Bruce was first tapped to come to Japan, it was to create this wine label, Coco Farm, as a social experiment underwritten by the Japanese government to employ neurologically and learning impaired citizens to produce wine. All of the workers on the project are afflicted with Down Syndrome or similar learning disabilities and the farm and winery give them an opportunity to find purpose through working with the agricultural and technical elements of wine making. Bruce led this initiative after 1989, and still consults and oversees operations to some degree.

As it turns out, Daniel and myself had a similar epiphany moment with these wines to Etienne. Last year we were visiting Singapore and had dinner with a Japanese sommelier there whom we knew from his time in NYC, and he brought a bottle of a whole cluster Pinot Noir from Japan to serve us blind. It was fantastic, and Daniel and I were both guessing it to be a whole cluster Nuits-Saint-Georges, so we were super surprised and humbled to learn it came from a vineyard that Coco Farms works in Honshu, close to Mount Fuji on its western slopes. We had no idea at the time the noble nature of the winery and its mission, but were blown away by the quality of the wine. And just a year later, I was able to meet the winemaker behind it, purely by chance!