The potential of Koshu wine that I learned about overseas.
That moved her.

Winemaker Ayana Misawa. There are many women involved in winemaking these days, but when she jumped into this world around 2004, there were others such as Masako Anzo (née Mizukami), who also works at Marufuji Winery in Katsunuma, and Noriko Kishihira, the fifth generation of Takeda Winery in Yamagata. , there were still only a few people left.

Ayana was born in Katsunuma, Yamanashi Prefecture, the birthplace of the Japanese wine industry, and Chuo Winery, also known as Grace Wine, was founded in 1923. When she was born, her grandfather, Kazuo, was at the forefront, and since 82, her father, Shigekei, has been involved in winemaking.

The Misawa family has Ayana's eldest son Keishi, and it seems that her father, Shigeshi, had no intention of letting his eldest daughter Ayana take over the wine-making business, nor did he himself have any desire to do so. Why did she, who was originally a boxed-in girl, decide to pursue winemaking on her own?

The impetus was an incident in Malaysia in 2002. There was a promotional event for Grace Wine at a restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, and Ayana was invited by her father to accompany him. The day after the successful event, the two were eating at the same restaurant when a female sommelier approached them. She says there is a couple she really wants to introduce to her.

There, a couple appeared: a woman from Vietnam and a man from Europe who were staying at the hotel. She accidentally tasted ``Grace Koshu'' and fell in love with it, so she visited the restaurant three days in a row and ended up emptying a bottle of Grace Koshu every night. They are overjoyed that she unexpectedly met the person who brewed the wine. Seeing this scene, Ayana realizes the greatness of her father, and at the same time, she reaffirms the potential of wine made from Koshu grapes. She was driven by her desire to bet her life on wine and the Koshu grape.

The road to Bordeaux was born out of an inevitable encounter.
3 years of training to learn the essence of winemaking

In 2004, he got a job at Chuo Winery. He has not received any specialized training, so he started from the bottom. However, that year, an encounter with a person led him to decide to enter the University of Bordeaux in France, the world's best winemaking school. That person is the late Professor Denis Dubourdieu, who was hailed as the ``god of white wine making.'' Professor Dubourdieu teaches at the University of Bordeaux and also works as a consultant for wineries around the world. In 2004, under the professor's initiative, the ``Koshu Wine Project'' was started in Katsunuma, and Chuo Winery stepped up as a cooperating winery.

At this time, I witnessed first-hand a sophisticated winemaking technique based on scientific evidence, rather than the experience and intuition that had previously been used in wineries to make wine. He thought, ``I need to learn the basics of classic winemaking,'' and set foot on the soil of Bordeaux, located in southwestern France, in February of the following year.

When he first moved to France, he says, his French was at a level where ``buying bread was the best I could do.'' However, when asked what was most difficult for him, he answered, not the difficulty of learning French or the difficulty of the classes, but ``not having mountains around me.'' The Bordeaux region, where two rivers meet midway and flow into the Atlantic Ocean, is a flat land that is unusual for a famous wine region. For Ayana, who grew up on the eastern edge of the Kofu Basin, surrounded 360 degrees by mountains, she must have felt like Heidi when she arrived at the Sesemann family in Frankfurt.

However, just as Heidi had Clara, Ayana had a schoolmate in Bordeaux who was a like-minded winery graduate. Although she sampled famous Bordeaux wines almost every day, Ayana recalls, ``I felt relieved when I tasted the Grace Koshu that was sent from Katsunuma.'' With the help of her friends, she successfully graduated from the Department of Enology at the University of Bordeaux, and the year after that, she obtained the qualification of advanced cultivation and brewing technician in Burgundy, another famous brewing region in France. After three years of training, she returned to Japan and made a fresh start as a brewer at Chuo Winery.

Our goal is to make Koshu world-class. Five years ago, at the DWWA (Decanter World Wine Awards) hosted by the UK's leading wine magazine, Decanter, our Cuvée Misawa Akeno Koshu 2013 won the gold medal for the first time as a Japanese wine. What you catch will bear fruit. Ten years have passed since Ayana joined Chuo Winery.

→ Continued to one of the souls made by winemaker Ayana Misawa (Part 2)

(Titles omitted)

Ayana Misawa
Born as the eldest daughter of Shigekei Misawa, the president of Chuo Winery in Katsunuma, Yamanashi Prefecture. In 2004, she joined Chuo Winery. In 2005 she moved to France, where she graduated from the DUAD (Tasting Course) at the Department of Oenology at the University of Bordeaux and received the qualification of Senior Cultivation and Brewing Technician in Burgundy. She completed a grape physiology course at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and during the off-season in Japan, she studied at wineries in the southern hemisphere, in New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Argentina, where the seasons are reversed. She is currently the Director and Cultivator and Brewer of Chuo Winery. Last year, she co-authored ``Creating Miracles with Japanese Wine'' (Diamond Publishing), which she co-authored with her father, Shigeki.

Grace Wine (Chuo Wine)
https://www.grace-wine.com/our_winery/katunuma/index.html