The Seven Samurai of Yoichi’s Wine World

A string of surprisingly good wines have emerged from the Yoichi region of Hokkaidō, Japan’s chilly northern island. A visit to the region’s vineyards unearths hints to the reasons for its recent successes and its bright future as a winemaking area.

Turning Crisis into Opportunity

In April 2025, British wine journalist and critic Jancis Robinson returned to Japan after six years away. Robinson has been a wine writer for 50 years, writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, and operates the wine information website JancisRobinson.com, with paying subscribers in over 80 countries. She could well be called one of the most influential wine critics in the world.

Her goal in coming to Japan this time was tasting Japanese wine to bring her own information up to date after Japanese wine’s enormous recent growth. With help from a Japanese wine-journalist acquaintance, she had a tasting of 1 sparkling wine, 13 whites, and 10 reds for a total of 24. She rated two-thirds of them—seven whites and nine reds—16.5 out of a total of 20 points, in the Good to Great range, on her personal scale. Of particular note were five wines fermented from grapes grown in Yoichi, Hokkaidō.

Over the last five years, Yoichi wines have seen a huge boost in international recognition, as discussed in an earlier article. The spark of that change is often seen as the 2010 founding of Soga Takahiko’s Domaine Takahiko, but foundations laid 30 years before serve as the true origin.

Domaine Takahiko’s Nanatsumori Pinot Noir. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Soga Takahiko standing in his Nanatsumori vineyard. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Yoichi is comparatively warmer than the rest of cold Hokkaidō. It has been a center for apple orchards, eating grapes, cherries, nashi pears, and other fruit production since the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Then, cheap apple imports in the 1970s cratered the price of apples. From a peak of over ¥2,000 per 18-kilogram crate, prices fell to the ¥200–¥300 range. Apple farmers faced a life-or-death crisis.

It was seven farmers, the so-called “seven samurai” of Yoichi wine, who took up a new idea to face this crisis. They were Fujimoto Tsuyoshi, Kimura Tadashi, Tasaki Masanobu, Nagai Hiroshi, Aki Shin’ichi, Hijino Shigeru, and Hirose Kazuya. In 1983, these seven farmers reached an agreement to replace some or all of their apple orchards with wine grape fields. Those grapes would be sold on a contract basis to wineries so the cultivation wouldn’t be subject to market fluctuations and the farmers could expect a more stable income. They tried growing varietals suited to colder climates, such as Seibel, Müller-Thurgau, Kerner, Zweigelt, and Pinot Noir.

A few years later, as harvests began to exceed the contracted amounts, other farmers began to follow suit and planted wine grapes. As of 2024, according to a Yoichi municipal survey, there are 72 wine grape growers in Yoichi farming over 160 hectares, which produced more than 960 metric tons of grapes in the 2023 season. Hokkaidō accounts for about 30% of Japan’s wine grape production, and half of that is concentrated in Yoichi and the surrounding Shiribeshi region.

“The main reason I chose Yoichi for my vineyards was seeing the quality when I discovered the grapes here, and understanding how the area had become a specialized producer of grapes for wine instead of eating,” says Soga Takahiko. Before his own fields began producing, Soga purchased grapes from Kimura Tadashi at the Kimura Vineyard, fermented them, and released the wine. The positive reception helped put him on the path of wine making.

The Nanatsumori vineyard. This was once a woodland producing seven different fruit types. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

20 Years of Trial and Error

In March 2025, I spoke to Kimura Kōji at his vineyard, which has become known for high quality Pinot Noir. Famed French label De Montille has expanded from Bourgogne into Hakodate, Hokkaidō, and is using grapes from Yoichi, including the Kimura Vineyard, for contract winemaking until its own fields are ready.

“We first planted Pinot Noir in 1985, but for the first few years we couldn’t get enough sugar or decent color. We just couldn’t harvest any proper fruit.”

Pinot Noir is a highly prized varietal, but it is also weak to disease and poor weather, making it hard to cultivate. As other farmers gave up on it, only Kimura continued to cultivate it. From the mid-1990s, the effort was supported by a purchase contract from Chitose Winery. That winery saw the potential of Yoichi-grown Pinot Noir and decided to take a risk on it.

Kimura talks about grape cultivation. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Massal selection is a process of carefully selecting outstanding vines in your own vineyard, taking cuttings from them and raising them into new vines. The Kimura family stuck to this high-effort method rather than purchasing cloned saplings from recognized vines. They piled up trial and error in improving their stock, such as emphasizing the Yoichi-characteristic high acidity by increasing the leaves, or pushing forward the harvest to keep down yields and increase ripeness.

Kōji says, “We started to see proper fruit around twenty years after we first started planting.”

The year Kōji joined the family business, 2008, was when they finally hit an unprecedented level of quality. On top of the struggles of both father and son, global warming had also contributed by making the Yoichi climate better suited for Pinot Noir cultivation. Part of their crop that year made its way into the hands of Soga at his Nagano Prefecture home at Obuse Winery. That became his first wine, as discussed above.

One wine buyer has said, “Kimura’s grapes have a uniquely erotic flavor.” Among the wines Jancis Robinson rated highly were two made from Kimura’s Pinot Noir grapes: Chitose Winery’s Kita Wine Pinot Noir Private Reserve 2021 and De Montille & Hokkaidō Pinot Noir Gaku Etude 2020. Six years before, Robinson had said that Japan’s whites were worthy of praise. This time, she commented that the quality of the reds stood out. She went on to say she was particularly impressed by Hokkaidō and would love to visit.

Etienne De Montille, who has expanded from Bourgogne into Hokkaidō. He is holding a bottle of Kyō Surprise 2019. (© Ukita Yasuyuki)

Wine and Farmer Together

At Nakai Kankō Nōen farm, one of the “seven samurai” farms, Nakai Jun is now serving as the fourth-generation head. He is growing eight varietals in sprawling vineyards overlooking the city symbol, Cape Shiripa, among them Kerner, Sauvignon Blanc, and other whites, alongside Pinot Noir. His ability to maintain high quality while cultivating a wide variety of fruit has earned him deep trust from contract wineries.

Nakai Mizuki, a fifth-generation farmer in the family, has also chosen to try making wine. After two years of training at Domaine Takahiko, he earned a fermentation license and founded Domaine Mizuki Nakai. Mizuki is currently waiting for his first tank of wine to finish fermenting, with an expected release this summer. He himself doesn’t drink much alcohol, so says of his wine, “I’m making easy-drinking rosé and white that I enjoy drinking myself.”

Soga says that from his own start of farming, he believed, “When current farmers begin making wine from their own grapes, it will remake Yoichi as a growing region.” Mizuki’s founding of a new winery in the domaine style of vine to bottle is the first example of Soga’s idea. The next phase might well see Yoichi ripen as a wine production region as more farmers start making wine themselves.

Domaine Mizuki Nakai’s wine label is Nobori no Oka. He explains that the name has three meanings. First, it takes nobori from the region name of Noboribetsu. Oka, or hill, reflects the farm’s location, and along with no also hints at nōka, or farmer. I find it a wonderful name, hinting at the ideal relationship between Yoichi’s wines and its farmers.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Pinot Noir grapes harvested in Yoichi, Hokkaidō. Among all the many wine varietals, it is a particularly delicate one. © Ukita Yasuyuki.)