Kurate Wine – A New Japanese Wine Style

Way back at the beginning of the year, February I think, I visited the Osaka Gift Show for my job (nothing to do with wine unfortunately). The Gift Show is a trade exhibition for various gadgets, crafts, gifts and other “novelty” items.

Amongst all the usb drives, personalised pen printing machines and hand made leather goods was a little booth promoting Kurate Wine and relishes.

Kurate Wine is a small company in Northern Kyushu (the western island of Japan) that grow the Kyoho Budou (Great Mountain Grapes), which is a popular grape variety in Japan, Taiwan and Korea, and is also grown in California and Chile, and they make wine from it.

This wine is kind of unusual in it’s supposed health benefits.

The grapes in the wine are actually called Wakazumi Kyoho, and Wakazumi in Japanese means “picked young”. So basically by picking the grapes early the wine ends up with 3 times the prophenol than if picked at the normal time. This prophenol apparently is good for the skin.

So Kurate Wine have been targetting the wine to ladies who like a tipple with health benefits.

The wine is also lower in alcohol than a lot of wines, at only 10%, so this might appeal to women also (certainly Japanese women anyway, who are generally less resilient to alcohol than their Western counterparts.).

I tried some of the wine, to be honest it wasn’t my usual kind of wine, a bit tart for me, and I started chatting to the guy on the stand, a very nice Umeda san, who explained about the benefits of the wine. He also told me they haven’t yet found a distributor for it in Japan, hence they were at the Trade Show.

When I mentioned this blog and told him I’d write about his wine (sorry it’s taken so long Umedasan!), he very kindly gave me a small bottle to take home.

It’s a fairly good wine (but not really my cup of tea) (review is here) and I wish them the best of luck!

As I said they’re looking for a distributor so if anyone is interested in finding out more about them, their website (only Japanese I’m afraid) is at www.kurate.jp.

They also make a Dessert Vinegar, pickles, and relishes.

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