Torocco Winery

Torocco Winery sits on a south-facing slope of Mt. Kannon in Hokuto, the small Oshima-peninsula city that looks across the bay toward Hakodate. Founded in 2021 by Sapporo chef Akihiro Nagao — the same hand behind the French restaurant Aki-Nagao — the project took over a long-tended cherry and prune orchard called FRONTIER, kept the thirty-year-old Niagara vines that came with it, and began the slow work of planting vinifera around them: Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Gamay, Savagnin. Three hectares, ten varieties, and, because Hokkaido waits for nothing, plenty of wind. The cellar opened in September 2024; until then the early bottlings — pétillants of estate Niagara, plus Yoichi-sourced Acolon, Kerner and Pinot Noir — were made under contract at 10R in Iwamizawa, where low-intervention is the house language. The name is the giveaway. A torocco is the small mine-cart railway that quietly moves what matters from the slope to the kitchen, and Nagao and vineyard manager Sachiko Ishida have built the winery as exactly that: a slow, self-rooted line connecting the Hokuto land to the table, one bottle at a time.