Sapporo Winery to Scale Down Production in Katsunuma

Katsunuma in Yamanashi Prefecture (not too far from Tokyo) is one of the major wine producing areas in Japan.
Last year my wife and I visited the area and visited some of the wineries.

One of the larger wineries, which was initially on our list to visit but turned out to be a bit further away than the others and involved a taxi or bus trip so we didn’t go was the
Sapporo Winery (which is actually in Koshu City, not Katsunuma itself).

I think this was very popular with tourists as it had a visitors area, a winery tour, etc and also has the famous Sapporo brand name, so more people have obviously heard of it compared to say L’Orient.. Although to be honest I thought they only made beer.

Anyway, to get to the point, I’ve just seen in the paper this week that from this year they are scaling down their wine production in this area and concentrating on their Okayama Winery in Okayama Prefecture (which is east of Osaka – the “other side” of Japan to Tokyo, kind-of).

They’re going to concentrate on specialised, high quality wine at the Katsunuma winery and produce only about 5000 cases a year from next year.

They are also closing the visitor section so you won’t be able to visit it anymore.
You can tour the Okayama Winery but apparently it is even more remote and involves a few bus trips, etc (we were planning on visiting it last year but because it was so inconvenient we went to Katsunuma instead).