Careful what you wish for
Japan, I am talking to you. I know this sounds like good times but just look around the world. Everywhere that currently makes wine is either going into or coming out of economic trouble. The reality is that there is only so much wine needed in the world. And guess what, the world doesn't need yours. Of course, the way you have defined 'Japanese' wine leaves a great deal of room for interpretation:
If I had a nickle for every prize, award, or medal given to a wine, I could almost afford my own winery. Then I could start collecting awards myself.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare dictates that a wine can still be labeled "Japanese" if as little as 5 percent of it is made domestically. And to qualify as "domestically made" wine, it only has to be fermented here, so many wineries import grape juice or concentrate from other countries and then ferment it here in order to satisfy their "domestic wine" requirements.This is like North Dakota in reverse. But it gets better:
This means that a blend composed of 95 percent Bulgarian bulk wine and 5 percent of wine made in Japan from reconstituted Australian grape concentrate can, incredibly, be labeled as "100 percent Japanese Wine."I think I need a drink. What happened here? At the risk of making a generalization, the Japanese are pretty smart people as a whole, right? Maybe there is still hope.
"For years," Gutlove explained, "growers focused on the well known marketing names Cabernet and Merlot, despite the fact that these grapes didn't respond well at all to Japan's climate. We finally decided that instead of growing what we thought we could sell, we'd prefer to learn to sell what we thought we could grow best here in Japan, even if no one had ever heard of the grape variety." (emphasis T.t.S.)Yo, California, maybe you ought to look into this concept.
Historical research revealed that it was actually the most widely planted grape in the preprohibition U.S., and that 100 percent Norton wines had even won prizes at international competitions in Vienna.Vienna, for real?? I'm assuming they're talking about the city in Austria and not the suburb of D.C. And what 'prizes' did it win? Best Norton at show? How much competition could it possibly have had?
If I had a nickle for every prize, award, or medal given to a wine, I could almost afford my own winery. Then I could start collecting awards myself.
1 Comments:
How is five percent a reasonable threshold for something to be "Japanese?" I assume that if you have only five percent Japanese heritage that you cannot claim Japanese citizenship or even claim that you are Japanese.
It is nice to see the Japanese decide to sell what they grow instead of trying to grow what they sell but California won't come to this conclusion until the bottom drops out of the market. Markets evolve in a shockingly similar way: First, a unique, high-price product is standardized and a level of homogeneity arises and lots of output is sold, then the market matures, consolidation and the also-rans are pushed out of the business, and product differentiation at a higher level of quality is often the result.
Think sodas, computers, and cars. I wager wine will follow the same path and the Japanese may be the canary in the mine.
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