This post was written in 2004. Shop details and prices may have changed since then.
By “wine in Japan” I don’t mean Japanese-made wine. ^_^;; I just want to talk a bit about the wine
that’s sold in Japan.
Wine culture took root in Japan much earlier than in Korea, and pretty much any shop you walk into has a wine list on a
whole different level from wine shops back home. The one exception was the department-store basements in Ginza.. those
were a bit pricey.. They say you can get good deals if you catch the department stores’ promotions, but when I went it was during the Athens
Olympics, so all they had was a Greek wine promotion -_-;; I can’t say whether that’s really true, but either way
it wasn’t a very impressive list. Enoteca Pinchiorri was a lot better.
So what I bought at Enoteca in Ginza is the Mondavi Chardonnay on the far right of the photo. I paid 3,000 yen for it,
and back home it goes for over 60,000 won. (Made me wonder how much it costs in the US ^_^)
All the other wines came from a wine shop called Yamaya. The three on the left were sold as a set of three for 5,000 yen;
the photo’s blurry so you may not be able to make them out, but they’re two bottles of Sauternes premier cru
and one Saint-Émilion grand cru. The Pauillac I bought separately as a gift; it was about 4,000 yen,
if I remember right. The half bottle of Moët & Chandon was just under 2,000 yen. I bought it to drink
at the hotel. Maybe because I only bought cheap wines.. none of them tasted amazing, but the vintages are decent
and for the price they were quite satisfying.
What I notice when buying wine in Japan.. is the Bordeaux craze here ^_^;; and, maybe because the wine market
has matured, that there are lots of good bottles among the sale items, and that around the 2,000-yen mark
there are plenty of perfectly decent wines. Montes Alpha, Chablis premier cru and so on: most of the wines you can happily
drink are around 2,000 yen. Many of them would cost twice as much in Korea and still be hard to
find. On the other hand, unlike in Korea, there weren’t many good wines in the 1,000-yen range.
This October I had another chance to pop over to Japan for a bit, and I checked out the wine sections of department stores and Carrefour
around Chiba. And they were incredible. Every store carried its own distinctive selection, and the prices were
much lower than in Tokyo. Carrefour’s wine list in particular was.. just a dream. Since
my wine knowledge is pretty shallow, I can’t properly explain what was good and how, but it was
pure bliss. Ever since then, I just can’t bring myself to buy wine in Korea ^_^;;
I guess the only way to learn about wine is to drink a lot of it. Hanging around the yepok club and eatncook,
I’ve learned a lot from many experts, but I still have a long way to go. When I go to Japan this time,
I’ll make sure to drink lots of wine. ^_^;;