After the long-long lists of dietary restrictions of the past couple of years, we once again occasionally have some wine in the house. Of course, since the source is, unavoidably, some random grocery store, the available options are not especially... appealing. But through trial and error have succeeded in finding a couple of palatable, as well as reasonably priced, options.
Combining the recent experiment notes with memories from earlier years has sort of led me to form a mental guideline of "Avoid ALL wines from the most common grapes and go for whatever is the rare one in any given shelf of bottles." I guess the logic is that many people who buy wine here just go for a name they have heard before, so the makers can bottle absolute garbage, get paid for it and the people then pretend that what they are consuming is great, because that's what they say in books, movies or tiktok... Meaning that Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc (from the whites), Merlot and Pinot Noir (from the reds) are to be completely avoided, while Moscato and Syrah have some likelyhood of being drinkable, depending on the maker. Special cases: two of the Sauvignon Blancs I've found work better than anything else for cooking (whereas the rest are simply paint-removers) and (if one gets through the nasty ones) some goes-nicely-with-meat Cabernet Sauvignons also exist. Tempranillo and Garnacha need further taste-testing, should I find any anywhere at all at any point.
And that's about the limit of what grapes one can find here - forget about the rest of the "world top ten wine grapes" lists, not to mention the other 10'000 different varieties that the original Vitis vinifera has been bred into so far.
Disclaimers:
All of the above is valid for 2024 Tokyo suburban setting, probably not so much for other, more wine-knowledgeable countries, nor central parts of the city, nor specialty wine shops.
I am still seriously missing the two limited edition bicycle-wines (whatever the real brand name was) we could easily get 4 years ago from shops near the then-home.
Cheers,
Hedi
