teamEggers

Japanese Wine Country

I miss you when you don’t comment. Just so you know.

In this episode, teamEggers runs out of money. Really. For about 12 hours, I only had six cents in my possession.

Jon had to give up his reserve $20 bill. The rare 2000 Yen note, only created in the year 2000. It was… depressing. We’ve never not had any money before.

But. I’m getting ahead of myself. We put our j-girls (emi and Mao) in charge of find out hotel for the night. They called random numbers from the Internet for a while, and eventually told us that we had some rooms for $40 per person. Hurray! I’m SO much more okay with winging it when Emi’s around.

Later that night, we find ourselves at the Suzuki En. (Suzuki is kind of like Smith. Really common last name.)

The Suzuki En was nice! And charming. And had all kinds of really perfect things going on. I couldn’t have picked a better place if I researched and really, really tried. They had vineyards in the backyard, made their own wine, and had a whole wine-theme going on. It wasn’t kitchy at all, just really… charming. Here’s the courtyard:

We stayed in Room 5.

And spent some time hanging out in the chilly courtyard before turning in early. This may have been the first Saturday in existence that Brian Reece & I went to bed at the same hour.

I love the detail of this hotel.

There was a collection of antique wine openers. Look at that red and white one. They’re pantaloons. The corkscrew is, ahem…

And this is the same wood-burning oven that the Eggers have up north!

…see!!

So the hotel was $40. No one in our group thought to go to the ATM before leaving for this remote mountain town, and Will didn’t even come with enough money for the train ride. We decided to scround together our last dollars and cents for breakfast in the morning. I’m glad we did – it was really good!

Our plans for the morning: 1. find money. 2. find the farmers market.

Here’s the thing. I’ve never *not* had money before. I’ve never had six cents to my name. Without Emi & Mao, we certainly would have been lost. Or rather, we would have found our way with much less efficiency than we did.

The hills of Katsunuma:

Koshu. The local grape. It grows differently than any other grape I’ve ever seen. The vineyards look… incredibly different. And they’re plentiful – nearly all the houses in the area had vines in their driveway.

Because of its thick, bitter skin, one of the best ways to cultivate it is to allow it to be far from the ground, but not in direct sunlight. What do you do? Make a canopy.

About 6 feet from the ground, they’d lay wire nets, and the grapes hang from the bottom. Boy, i wish we had come in fall when the fruit was hanging. This valley is probably incredibly.

This vending machine is exciting only for its rarity. I wish there were more beer machines on the streets, or that i didn’t find this one at 10am.

Eventually we made it to our farmers market. I had incredibly low expectations and was really surprised at its awesomeness. It’s no West Allis farmer’s market. And it’s no Seattle farmer’s market, but it was way better than I expected.

First order of business: find the guy with the beans. There’s always one.

After some shopping about (I bought some greens and jon bought some fresh pasta!), we stopped by a tasting room and did a quick wine tasting. I came home with a bottle of rosé.

I love how thoroughly ingrained the grapes are into the culture here. I love wine country. It’s just so… perfect. For a weekend.

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