Andrew Jefford / 02 July 2019
Blossom in a glass
Blossom in the park - Japan
It was pure chance, a
one-in-fifty-two jackpot:
my first visit to Japan
serendipitously coincided
with 2019's peak cherryblossom week. Would I get
to see them? The schedule
seemed ominously hectic.
Anxiety misplaced, as it
turned out: the blossoms
come to see you. Orchards
aside (where peach petals
add to the dazzle), Japan's
ornamental cherries
march proudly through
every park and residential
quarter. Their wild cousins,
meanwhile, out in the grey, leafless winter
woodland of the hills, suddenly break
cover in an exclamation of pink. The white
blossom can be more exciting still, sucking
up the raw spring sunlight the better to
amplify it.
Japanese attention to detail is evident
from the moment you walk across the
airbridge, not least at mealtimes. Timidly, I
ordered a western-style cooked breakfast
in my Kofu hotel on my first morning
there. As I ate the immaculately fried
eggs and geometrically trimmed and
crisped bacon, it was evident that this
was the best executed version I had ever
had. Thus encouraged, I opted for the
Japanese breakfast the following morning:
a box of treasures scattered among little
dishes (including what seemed to be tiny,
crisply fried elvers as
well as roe, pickled
cabbage, seasoned
beans, confit onion and a
tremblingly poached egg) to
accompany succulent, soytanned salmon and a bowl
of nourishing dashi with
seaweed and scallops. And
that's just breakfast; lunch
and dinner were better still.
Japanese wine producers
make a bigger range of wines
than we tend to realise:
chardonnay and Bordeaux style blends as well as syrah,
tannat and tempranillo,
though Japan's most common red wine
is made from muscat bailey A, a cross
between black muscat and bailey (a complex
hybrid). Being Japanese, they do this with all
the plausibility and lack of vulgarity a subtropical climate allows.
Blossom, vines, Mount Fuji...could there be a more perfect view?
Koshu grapes, each with its own tiny rain hat in Japan
If you want a wine to sip as you sit on
a picnic blanket and admire the cherry
blossom as so many office workers were
doing this week, then it has to be koshu.
The origins of this pure-vinifera variety
are a mystery (one theory, being probed
at present, is that it travelled along the
Silk Road from Georgia in the Caucasus).
Despite the hot and humid Japanese
summer, this late ripener struggles to
acquire sugar before close of play in
October. Its thick skins, though, resist
rain well.
It makes an understated white; at first sip,
you may be nonplussed. That, though, is
because you haven't yet understood just
how Japanese it in fact is, how light and
precise, how neat and well-swept, how
white-gloved and bowingly respectful. Take
the time (on an imaginary picnic blanket, at
least) to read a haiku or two, to note the
petals skating through the bright air like
winter's first flakes of snow, and then you
will begin to see its fugitive orchard-fruit
charm, its faintly saline crackle, its deft
harmonies. And you won't – as I didn't –
want to stop, up, or leave.
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