A Lovely, Pale Rose Rosé with Softly Penetrating Flavor

The hue is pale rose, but feels oily with surprising self-assurance. Add a raspberry-like fruitness, and a slight astringency that puckers the inner cheek, followed by a bittersweetness that reverberates comfortably—echoing again and again. The gentle, penetrating flavor has been known to trigger gasps of wonder.

The wine is called Setsuna Uta (‘Splitsecond Song’). Fumiaki Konishi, Nobori Jozo’s vintner in Yoichi-cho, Hokkaido, makes the wine from dark purple grapes called Zweigelt. Konishi, at the time a staff member of an agricultural organization, visited a wine bar in Tokyo one day where he encountered some Touraine Sauvignon, the flagship of natural wines from Thierry Puzelat in France’s Loire region. Completely taken by the taste, and determined to make such a wine himself, he moved to Hokkaido and started learning how to cultivate grapes.

He learned winemaking from the Bruce Gutlove, a veteran wine consultant in Hokkaido. Having set his heart on Tourraine Sauvignon as the standard, Konishi wanted to make a clear, pure, and mellow wine. Because most of the grapes he cultivated were of the dark purple Zweigelt variety, he crushed whole clusters quickly to prevent the color from deepening. Then, utilizing the wild yeast in the must, he waited for fermentation to start naturally.

‘At first, relying on wild yeast, namely, yeast that occurs naturally in the soil and the vines, seemed unreliable. I thought it would be better to use a strain of yeast that would produce a wine with a more predictable effect on the taste’, admits Konishi. ‘But then, as I made my own batches, I became fascinated with the complexity of wild yeast. The gentleness to the mouth was another attraction, so whatever negative aspects I encountered, I studied ways of avoiding them’. This translates into keeping the grapes healthy, handling the must carefully, and keeping the cellar spotlessly clean—sound simple? Absolutely fundamental to winemaking, they are difficult to realize in practice. Gutlove’s advice that ‘Everything matters’ made a deep impression on him. ‘Every task, every parameter will affect the taste of the wine, so whether I’m in the vineyard or the winecellar, you’ll find me muttering ‘everything matters, everything matters,’ because that’s what’s on my mind’. The result? A spirited rosé, with an unforgettable taste.