Coming Soon
Torocco Winery
トロッコワイナリー
Hokkaido, Hokuto, Japan
Joining our portfolio. 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.
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.
Winemaking Philosophy
Self-rooted, nature-led growing — 自根栽培, ungrafted vines that find the site on their own terms. Low-intervention winemaking that lets the land's character speak through the grape rather than the cellar. The torocco — the small mine-cart railway — is the metaphor: a steady, slow line that moves what matters from the slope to the table, bottle by bottle.
The estate occupies an old cherry-and-prune orchard called FRONTIER, kept on as a tourism farm alongside the wine grapes. Nagao splits his time between Sapporo, where he runs the French restaurant Aki-Nagao, and Hokuto. Vineyard manager Sachiko Ishida runs the day-to-day. The first proper estate-cellar wines are 2024 (pet-nat first, still wines following); the fully estate-grown "domaine" wines are projected for 2028–2029, once the youngest plantings come of age.
