Chateau Mercian Katsunuma Winery

One of the largest and most famous wineries in Japan is Chateau Mercian and the Mercian Katsunuma Winery.

This is the Japanese wine you usually find in supermarkets and convenience stores throughout Japan. They tend to cover all price ranges from the cheapest, table/cooking wine to expensive vintage wine. Grace Winery on the other hand for example seems to concentrate on the higher quality wines.
The Mercian Katsunuma Winery is just up the road from the Soryu, Domaine Chateraise and Chanmoris wineries and we visited twice, we were too late for the tour on the first day so came back the next for the guided tour round the winery, which unfortunately doesn’t take you out in to the vineyards but just around the winery buildings. It was still quite interesting and free, so worth the visit.

There are vineyards all around this area so you can get to see them on your own anyway.

In fact, if you follow the road up the hill after a hundred yards or so the road bends to the right, you’ll be able to see Soryu winery on the other side of the junction, there’s a small road leading off to the left which will take you to the Mercian winery museum and round the back of there there’s a selection of different vines growing so you can see and compare the grapes next to each other.

There’s also some stunning scenery around there and some interesting Japanese stone lantern/monuments.

The museum itself (which is free, and essentially just two big rooms) has some interesting objects from the Mercian Winery history including bottles from the 50’s up to the present day so you can see how the label designs have changed, and some bottles for the Japan/Korea World Cup in 2002.

There were also some old adverts, information about the history of Mercian wine including a video (in Japanese of course) and you can go down into what I assume to be an original cellar containing huge barrels.

Unfortunately there was no English translation of anything. But it’s still worth checking out as there’s lots of interesting stuff to look at.

Also, there was a small article in the Japanese newspaper a few weeks ago, about a Visitors Centre they’re building at the winery which is due to be open from August of this year (2010).
That will be part of the winery, not the museum.


Some Chateau Mercian wines:
Chateau Mercian Nagano Merlot 1999
Chateau Monogatari Rose
Katsunuma Monogatari White

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• Katsunuma Wineries in Japan
• Yamanashi Winery, Katsunuma Japan
• Asaya Winery, Katsunuma, Japan
• Soryu Winery Katsunuma