Tsukuhara knew about all of this, of course. And, after Noma served its ants-on-prawns dish at its pop-up in Tokyo in 2015, he had heard of other chefs in the Tokyo area putting them on pizzas and curry rice. He was working on insect fermentation as well as an alcoholic drink infused with bee larvae and bees’ nests, which are rich in sixteen types of amino acid (from the bee spit used as its glue). He had even recently sent some bee larvae butter to Cambridge University for research.
After thanking Tsukuhara for his many gifts of plastic-packed insects to take away, we left his restaurant, still not entirely convinced that we would be adding insects to our diet but definitely certain that everyone else should.
Back on the ski slopes the next day, I disentangle my legs from my skis, and slowly make my way down the rest of the nursery slope, sliding all the way on my bottom. I return to our hotel room. Waiting for me in an email attachment is a press cutting, kindly sent by our friend at the tourist board. It is a report on the previous day’s visit to the insect restaurant.
Above a photograph of me sipping from a tea cup is the headline: ‘British Journalist Drinks Shit Tea’.
Chapter 20
Wine
In Koshu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, there is a statue of Buddha which is said to be over 1,200 years old. This is remarkable, though not unique. What is special about this statue at the Daizenji temple is that in his left hand the Koshu Buddha is holding a bunch of grapes.
The story goes that the Buddha depicted in the statue, Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of Healing and Medicine, appeared to Gyoki, the priest who founded the Daizenji temple, in 718, and presented him with a bunch of grapes. Gyoki took this as a sign that grapes were of medicinal and spiritual significance and, as well as carving this likeness of Yakushi Nyorai holding the grapes from a single piece of cherry wood – now rather fragile, the statue is only shown once every five years (the next showing is from 1 to 8 October 2018, if you’re interested) – he also planted the first ever grapevines in Japan in the grounds of the temple.
This may or may not be historically accurate but it is true that grapes first came to Japan around the time of Gyoki. DNA analysis of Japanese grapes has proven that they came originally from the Caucusus, so they probably arrived via China and the Silk Road, with Buddhist monks. The grapes were most likely of the Koshu variety (after which Koshu City is named), which have been cultivated in Japan as table grapes ever since.
Grapes are all very well but it is wine that has brought me to Yamanashi Prefecture today. My family and I have travelled on from Nagoya to Tokyo where I have left them for the day to rediscover their favourite city while I go on a hunt for the best wine in Japan.
Wine was not made in Japan for some centuries after Gyoki’s grape revelation, not until the Portuguese Jesuits arrived in the sixteenth century. They probably also used Koshu grapes but their nascent wine production was purged along with all the other accoutrements of Christianity, and it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when Japan reopened for business to the Western world, that the Japanese wine industry began its long, slow fermentation.
Around that time, two young men, Masanari Takano and Sukejiro Tsuchiya, left their home town of Katsunuma in Yamanashi Prefecture for France to learn how to make wine the French way. They returned to run the Mercian wine company which remains one of the biggest in Japan. But still wine did not really take off in Japan. The industry bumbled along for a few decades more trying to make something drinkable out of this humdrum table grape variety, but was mostly eclipsed by the emergence of domestic beers like Kirin and Sapporo, and in particular whisky, almost being wiped out entirely by cheap wine imports after World War II. But then came the golden years of the 1970s and 1980s when a more prosperous Japan opened up to even greater Western influence, particularly in terms of its food. Foreign wine imports grew and domestic wine also began to find a market, although the interest in Japanese wine still stemmed primarily from its novelty value, or from some kind of misguided jingoism.
In my experience, Japanese wine remained borderline undrinkable. Much of it was an industrial product made from imported frozen grape juice concentrate, often these were flowery, soapy-flavoured whites which left a taste in your mouth as if you had walked briskly through Harrods perfume department.
So why bother? After all, sake, which is obviously so much easier to make in Japan, not only rivals wine for complexity and deliciousness and uses an ingredient which is more easily cultivated in Japan, but it pairs even better with food (there, I said it).
Generally in life I prefer to cling to my ingrained, ill-informed prejudices. It just makes things simpler. Thus, I had told myself that Japanese wines were really only worth drinking once, and to be fair, in this I was not alone: a typical headline on the subject was ‘Japanese Wine: Not As Bad As You Think’, which I once saw in the Japan Times. The typhoons, humidity, rain and relatively low level of sunlight, combined with unsuitable, meagre soils, meant that Japan was never going to be a wine country to rival France or, these days, even England. And life was just too short to drink bad wine. This certainly simplified the drinks choice when in Japan: I stuck resolutely to sake.
But, slowly, news began to reach me that something was afoot in Japanese wine. Sales increased 35 per cent between 2009 and 2014, breaking all records. It had become normal to see Japanese wine for sale at convenience stores; in fact, these days there is often as much wine on offer as there is sake, but I began also to see Koshu wines on menus at decent restaurants, like the Michelin-starred Les Créations des Narisawa in Tokyo. In the UK, Marks & Spencer began selling Japanese wines made from Koshu grapes for £12.99 a bottle.
This recent success has been driven in large part by female drinkers, but the Japanese were also learning to drink wine at home, not just at European restaurants. My own Damascene moment came when I was offered a glass of an excellent Japanese Pinot Noir by chef Ikegawa at my favourite yakitori place, Torishiki, in Meguro, Tokyo. It tasted every bit as sophisticated as a decent, dry Alsatian Pinot Noir – it was a wine you would want to spend some time with.
I started to read up a little more on the state of the Japanese wine industry and to taste more Japanese wines too (such are the flimsy excuses upon which I justify my alcohol intake). Here is what I learned: there are a growing number of natural wine producers in Japan, particularly in Hokkaido; the number of wine bars was rapidly increasing in major cities. They make wine in Nagano and on Kyushu and, recently, efforts have been made to turn the disaster-struck Miyagi Prefecture into a wine tourism destination, but the main wine-growing region in Japan is still Yamanashi Prefecture, where the industry is focused on the Kofu Basin a couple of hours west of Tokyo, just the other side of Mount Fuji.
My train from Tokyo climbs through forested mountains and river valleys, the frequent tunnels turning the landscape into a real-life zoetrope. There is darkness, then a flash of outrageously slanting scenery, then darkness again, a glimpse of Fuji, and then finally, as we emerge onto the Yamanashi Plain, landscape covered with massive canopies of vines trained in pergolas two metres from the ground, squares of white paper carefully placed over the bunches of grapes to protect them from the elements.
I get off at Katsunuma Station, a semi-rural farming area in the heart of the Kofu Basin. There are forty wineries in this town alone. A short taxi ride takes me to the ivy-covered entrance to the Grace Winery main building where Ayana Misawa is waiting to show me around. Grace was founded in 1923 by Chotaro Misawa, Ayana’s great-grandfather. She is the first woman to run the winery.
‘When I was a child, I thought wine-making was a man’s job,’ Ayana says as we look around one of the original barns which now has a tree, planted in 1923, growing right through the roof in the middle of it. There is something of that tree’s determination in Ayana. Though friendly and welcoming, she also has an evident steeliness. She is a woman on a mission.
‘People used to say you can’t make great wines from Koshu grapes, but my grandfat
her and father believed it was possible,’ she tells me as we stand by the vast stainless steel tanks in which they make Grace wine. ‘I want to continue what they started. It takes several generations to make a great wine.’
Grace produces 200,000 bottles a year, a comparatively tiny yield, only 10 per cent of which is exported. ‘I’d love to export more, but we could sell all of it just in Tokyo if we wanted to,’ she says. A decent bottle of Grace wine costs around ¥5,000 (£35), expensive for Koshu, although some of their wines can cost double that, virtually unheard of in the world of Japanese wine.
There is no track record of making really good wine from Koshu grapes, certainly not wines to challenge the best of the New World, or even Europe. ‘Every year is challenging,’ admits Ayana. ‘There are huge vintage variations: once every ten years we get a great year.’ As well as the many meteorological challenges, labour costs are high and so are land prices. There are so many more lucrative things you can do with a patch of soil within two hours of Tokyo, plus, there are poisonous snakes at large. Ayana insists that no pesticides or insecticides are used on Grace’s wines, and they only use organic fertiliser.
To grow Koshu grapes for eating, the Japanese use a highly productive style of vine training – those vast canopies, sometimes fifty metres wide, which I had seen from the train. That, and the grape’s unusually thick, pinkish skin, helps protect it from the humidity which can cause fungus to develop and also helps the plants get as much sun as possible to produce a maximum yield. A single vine grown this way can give as many as 500 bunches of grapes – good news if you are growing table grapes – but that kind of yield means it is impossible to achieve the sugar levels needed for decent wine making, as Ayana explains. ‘I really wanted to change from those huge yields. They are fine for fresh, fruity wines, but not so good for the serious Koshu that I wanted to make. I wanted to make a super-Koshu.’
A few years ago Ayana began experimenting with conventional vertical vines which, though they yield as few as twenty bunches per vine, produce a far better quality, more flavourful grape. It was a technique she had learned during three years studying wine making in Burgundy and Bordeaux, where she was the first of her family to undergo such an education.
‘At some of the vineyards in France they had never seen a Japanese person before, let alone worked with a Japanese woman,’ she recalls. But Yamanashi people are mountain people. The women in particular are very strong. We are used to a tough life.
‘I want to prove Koshu is a wonderful variety,’ she emphasises once more. We have now driven to a viewpoint high above the misty, fruit-filled valley. ‘My father and grandfather dedicated their lives to it.’ Ayana is quietly spoken, serious, intense, but I notice that whenever she speaks about these two men her voice grows quieter still. She explains that her father spent years trying to grow superior Koshu grapes for wine production from seed but eventually gave up. Her vertical shoot method has enabled them to achieve that, and turn Koshu into a proper wine grape.
‘Your father must be very proud of you,’ I suggest. She pauses and, for a moment I sense she is about to well up, but the steely look returns. ‘I need to prove he was right.’
According to Ayana, London is the most important wine market in the world, so the awards lining the Grace showroom from the likes of Decanter magazine (a gold medal from its World Wine Awards – the first ever for a Japanese vineyard), and praise from English wine writer Jancis Robinson – who called Yamanashi ‘the Bordeaux of Japan’ – are clearly important. But there is one man whose opinion, for better or worse, still counts above everyone else’s in the wine world: Robert Parker, whose rudimentary percentage ranking system for wines has transformed the global wine industry. So what did Parker make of Ayana’s Grace Wine revolution? Parker has actually visited Grace Wine, and I have seen what he wrote in their visitors’ book.
We return to the main building for a tasting. Ayana is called away to the telephone and in walks an elderly man who introduces himself. This is her father, Shigekazu Misawa, now in his seventies. We talk a little about the wines on the table in front of us, and it is then that I mention Parker.
Misawa-san abruptly rises from the table and leaves the room. What have I said? Had Parker given them a bad review? Did they despise the American’s fixation on heavy, fruity wines, and the homogenising effect he had had on the New World wine industry?
Misawa-san returns a few moments later, carrying their visitors’ book. He opens it proudly at the page signed by Parker during his visit in 2004 on which is written:
‘To Grace Wine,
Congratulations on a very fine 2004 Koshu. I was very impressed with this wine and wish you great success.
Thank you for the visit –
Robert Parker
(Parker later gave the wine 87/88 out of 100, a decent score from him for a light wine with low alcohol – 10.5 per cent.)
Ayana returns and her father ambles off. She has generously arranged for me to taste some of their wines, but the tasting begins awkwardly. Their entry level wine, Gris de Koshu, is rather acidic and perfumey, confirming my prejudices about Japanese whites. The more expensive Grace Koshu white wine is better, more subtle, though perhaps still too delicate for me. Ayana says that its clarity works well with sushi, and I think its dry, fruity tartness would also be a match for yakitori and tempura. Next up is a Cuvée Misawa Akeno Koshu, made with grapes grown on Ayana’s innovative vertical vine system. This is better still. I can taste the minerality of the volcanic soil and it has a strong umami ‘length’. The rosé is OK too, with a friendly caramel flavour. But then comes another, different, problem: the fifth wine Ayana offers me, a red Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot blend, is stunning: elegant, complex, and nicely tannic – genuine echoes of Bordeaux. Though this is only supposed to be a tasting and there is a spittoon on the table, I can’t stop drinking it. I find myself hoping another phone call will take Ayana away for a few moments, so I can guzzle some more of this fantastic wine.
‘Koshu is my passion, my great love,’ Ayana says, looking out of the window at the vines beyond. I take another large slurp of this wonderful red wine and, by the time her eyes return to the table, am nodding sympathetically.
TOKYO
Chapter 21
Ramen
You’re bored of ramen, aren’t you? Sick and tired of food nerds raving about the latest yuzu-infused broth, or this ‘amazing place’ they know where they ‘make their own noodles from scratch’. You’re exhausted from reading endless magazine stories about the ramen revolution, ramen burgers, ramen burritos, ramen wars; tired of ramen Nazis telling you that you don’t understand what makes a good bowl, assuring you that you will never taste a bowl as good as the one they once had in a back street in Takadanobaba, that you can never properly appreciate Hakata ramen without going to Kyushu, or butter corn ramen without a visit to Sapporo.
I love eating ramen, good ramen, but my patience with all this bullshit has run out. My breaking point came one evening in Tokyo. I had heard of a ramen restaurant which was attempting to take noodle soup upscale, a self-proclaimed ‘kaiseki ramen’ joint in Ebisu.
A traditional kaiseki meal consists of a fixed template of courses showcasing seasonal ingredients, presented simply but artfully on carefully chosen tableware. As I took my place at the restaurant’s black lacquered bar with gold-leaf table mats, having left my family for the evening to dine solo, I was genuinely interested to see how this would translate into ramen.
Innovation number one: this is the first restaurant I have ever eaten in where the staff offer to provide special lighting so that I can photograph my food better. I decline but everyone else seated in this inhospitable concrete bunker is clicking away noisily. (In Japan, all mobile phone cameras must make a shutter noise when you take a photograph as a result of legislation introduced to combat the unfortunately high incidence of sex pests shooting up women’s skirts on escalators.)
The hors d’oeuvres serve as more of a warning than a w
elcome: a charmless paste of pumpkin and gorgonzola still lingers like a stubborn stain on my memory, and I also shudder-remember a thick, overly salty mushroom soup. The traditional slice of pork, the chashu, which usually adorns the bowl of ramen is served separately and for some reason has been poached in jasmine tea then blow-torched for good measure. That’ll teach it. When the actual soup arrives it is nice enough, but rather thin, as are the noodles (I detest thin ramen noodles. Ramen is no place for somen: thin noodles overcook in the residual heat from the soup).
Towards the end of the meal, the owner enters wearing a t-shirt sporting the logo of the industrial pasta company Barilla. He spends most of his time showing off his very large watch to some of the other diners. I leave desolate, despairing and also hungry.
My kaiseki ramen experience sparks something of a crisis in me. The restaurant’s fancification of something which ought to be quick, cheap and delicious seems to suck all that is great from a bowl of ramen. The only two things that really matter with ramen are the noodles and the soup, yet like so many in the world of ramen these days they had seemed much more interested in ‘the concept’ and the fripperies. But I don’t want a concept, or a deconstruction, or a poshed-up bowl, I want thick, slightly chewy noodles, a soft-boiled, soy-soaked egg, a slice of tender chashu and a deep, rich soup that forces me to let my belt out a notch, all for under a thousand yen. Is that too much to ask?
The Meaning of Rice Page 17