Château Mercian Winery Guide

This poster of grapevines catching hold of an American fighter plane is an interesting use of propaganda to help galvanize public support for the war effort. The poster encourages farmers to grow great quantities of grapes. Crystalline potassium sodium tartrate from tartaric acid, a byproduct of winemaking, was used as an integral material for sonar detection systems deployed to hunt US submarines during World War Two. The sonar systems used the Piezoelectric Effect where crystals display a visible electrical reaction generated via sound waves. These days we think of these crystals as wine diamonds or wine stars, but they were viewed as essential to conducting the war in the Pacific in the early 1940s. The propagandists clearly thought a picture of a fighter plane would be more of a motivator to land-locked farmers than a picture of a submarine.

In the late 19th Century, wine was shipped down the Fuefuki River to the Fuji River where it would be transferred on to Shizuoka, and finally on to Tokyo by train. It took more than a full day to make the trip to Tokyo, and the wine bottles had to be handled many times during transfers from boat to boat and then to train. In 1903, the train line made its way through the mountains to Kofu, Yamanashi’s capital city, thus reducing the time it took to transport wine to Tokyo to just 6 or 7 hours!

The advertisements on the right as you enter the museum are signboards from the Meiji period and later that would have been hung outside shops in the fashion you see here. The shrimp seen on one of the signboards is a traditional sign of longevity and good luck in Japan, and its shape is also reminiscent of clusters of wild mountain grapes.

Daikokuten, one of Japan’s seven lucky gods, is depicted sitting on two barrels of wine instead of the usual two bales of rice. This type of imagery would have been very familiar to Japanese people, and the use of wine barrels instead of rice bales would have been seen as an ingenious marketing ploy.

On the far right is a sign board promoting a competitor’s saffron-infused wine. Wine was promoted as a health tonic to get around early conflict with Japanese sake producers.

This building was constructed in 1904 by one of our predecessors, Kotaro Miyazaki. Being Japan’s oldest wooden winery, this building is recognized by the Japanese government as a historic asset from the Meiji period’s industrial modernization from 1868 to 1912, and as such, has been a museum since 1974. 

While studying in France, Masana Maeda, an early supporter of Japan’s industrial modernization, purchased seeds and seedlings of more than 1,000 species of plants, trees, fruit trees, and grains to bring back to Japan. In addition, an agronomist named Charles Baltet prepared 10,000 vines for Maeda. In 1877, Maeda asked Baltet to help educate Masanari Takano and Ryuken Tsuchiya, two young men from this area, in the art of wine making. Baltet had the two travel to Troyes, the Champagne region of northern France, to study under his assistant, Pierre Dupont. Kotaro Miyazaki’s father refused to let him travel to France with the other two. However, when Dai-Nihon Yamanashi Budoshu Company Limited, Yamanashi’s first winery, failed in 1886, Miyazaki decided to collaborate with Ryuken Tsuchiya to establish Kai-san Budoshu Winery, and in 1888 opened Kai-San Shoten as a sales office in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. The first wine the two made in the French style didn’t sell well. Later, Miyazaki decided to go it alone, while Tsuchiya went off to found his own winery. Instead of producing dry French-style wines, Miyazaki began to produce sweeter wines, which sold markedly better.