Grape
Grapes
Grape varieties and how they express themselves across climates and soils.
Koshu
Japan’s ancient grape — a thousand years of cultivation, a decade of international recognition
Koshu is a pink-skinned grape variety cultivated in Japan for over a thousand years. DNA analysis has confirmed its Vitis vinifera origins — likely arriving via the Silk Road from the Caucasus. It makes transparent, mineral white wines uniquely suited to Japanese cuisine.
Pinot Meunier
Champagne's most site-specific grape — and its most misread
Pinot Meunier is not the blending grape it has long been dismissed as. A chimeric mutation of Pinot Noir whose downy, flour-dusted leaves earned it the name "miller," it dominates the Vallée de la Marne because no other variety survives its clay soils and frost-prone valley floors as reliably — or expresses them as honestly. In the hands of the grower-producer movement, it has become Champagne's most exciting subject.
Champagne — Vallée de la Marne
Chardonnay
The world's most versatile white grape
Chardonnay is grown in virtually every wine-producing country and expresses itself across an extraordinary range of styles — from the razor-edged minerality of Chablis to the rich, barrel-fermented whites of the Côte de Beaune. In Champagne, it is the backbone of Blanc de Blancs.
Burgundy / Champagne
Pinot Noir
Burgundy's benchmark — and Champagne's structural backbone
Pinot Noir is the primary red grape of Burgundy and one of Champagne's three permitted varieties. Thin-skinned, temperamental, and site-sensitive, it produces wines of extraordinary complexity when grown in the right soils and in the right hands.
Muscat Bailey A
Japan's most widely planted red grape — a hybrid born in 1927
Muscat Bailey A is a hybrid grape variety created by Zenbei Kawakami at Iwanohara Vineyard in 1927, crossing Bailey (an American hybrid) with Muscat Hamburg. It is Japan's most widely planted red variety, known for its accessible red-fruited character and low tannin.
Yamanashi