Callicott Family in Texas: Yamanashi Wine Country

We have a four day weekend, so we decided to day trip to Yamanashi Wine Country. We took the train through some beautiful mountains (near Mount Fuji, although it was too cloudy to see it) to Katsunuma, which has a third of the total wineries in the county. The Japanese grow koshu grapes, which have thick skins that are resistant to rot (yay for Japanese humidity and rainy seasons). We were too late to see the grapes, but we were just in time to see the beautiful fall leaves and taste the newly bottled wines for 2008.
The first thing we saw as we were getting off the train was a small park with a train car. Adam thought it was the best thing ever. He ran over to the train, yelling, "Come here train. I want to huggle you!" I guess a huggle is a cross between a hug and a snuggle; that's a new one.

Once we started walking through the valley, we found some beautiful red bushes.

Then we walked through the valley and admired the dead vineyards. We did see some apple trees and persimmon trees.

The Japanese were hanging their persimmons. I guess they dry them to eat later?

We walked down the hill, through the valley, and back up another hill, to find Budono-oka, run by the city, which has 170 different wines available to sample (from all the different wineries in town). You pay 1100 yen (about $10) to get a metal tasting cup for sampling all the wine you would like. The entrance to the wine cellar had this picture of the grapes of Canan.

Adam didn't want to go to the cellar, ("Scary!") but soon realized that he could have fun dumping out the excess wine from Mommy and Daddy's tastings into the buckets. He soon claimed a tasting cup for himself. The wine was all self-serve. There were about 30 wine barrels with loads of wine on each. Since we couldn't read the labels, we just picked pretty labels, since there were way too many to try all of them. There were also racks of each wine available to buy right there. I can't even imagine this in the US. People would drink way too much or would not recap the bottles or spill all over. The Japanese were very careful, of course!

There was also a small festival going on outside the wine center. We tried the local specialty, hoto, a udon dish with lots of vegetables in a creamy broth. By the time we bought ours, there weren't any noodles left in the broth, but plenty of veggies. We told Adam the veggies and meat were noodles, and somehow, he bought it. He ended up eating almost all the stuff in the broth, even though he usually hates meat.