No. 505 Hiroshima Winery

Hiroshima's first dedicated natural-wine winery, no.505 was opened on May 5, 2024 — the date is its name — by Shingo Otō, a former Tokyo fashion-event director who'd been pouring natural wine at his Shibuya shop no.501 since 2016. The estate sits at 420 metres on a plateau in Mihara's Yamato-cho, fifteen minutes from Hiroshima Airport, on family land Otō began experimenting with grapes nearly a decade before bottling here. Head winemaker Toshihide Arai joined from a cellar in neighbouring Okayama; production manager Mayumi Yuguchi came west with the project from the Tokyo shop. What sets no.505 apart isn't only that it's the prefecture's first natural cellar — it's the choice of fruit. Otō and Arai work mostly with Japanese table-grape varieties (Shine Muscat, Delaware, Aki Queen, Tenshu, Fujiminori, Pione, Niagara) farmed without chemicals, hand-picked berry by berry by ripeness, and fermented only on wild yeast with no added sulfites. The wines are bottled under names that read like postcards from a Hiroshima living room — Blue Pickup Truck, Yes Backflip, Terrible-Twos Phase, Midori-chan, the dialect particle Jaro — and the project's whole reason for being, in Otō's telling, is to make natural wine feel less reverent and more reachable. In November 2024 no.505 was the only Japanese exhibitor at RAW WINE in New York and Toronto.