Manns Wines Katsunuma: A Private Visit to a Founding Name in Japanese Wine

There is a winery in Katsunuma that has been making Japanese wine from Japanese grapes for longer than most of the country's other wineries have existed. You will find it along a road lined with old vines, in a town where the hills carry the faint shadow of Mount Fuji on a clear morning. Its name is Manns Wines. Its presence here is not incidental — it is foundational.

Most visitors to Yamanashi wine country encounter Manns Wines as a label: on the wine list of a Tokyo hotel, perhaps, or in a shop specializing in Japanese bottles. Far fewer have stood inside its cellars, walked its vineyards in the late afternoon, and tasted Koshu directly from the source. That is the experience Wintage Tour arranges.

A Winery Built to Define Japanese Wine

In 1962 — two years before the Tokyo Olympics, at a moment when Japan was reorienting itself toward international ambitions — Kikkoman, the food manufacturing company perhaps best known outside Japan for its soy sauce, established a winery in Katsunuma with a single, deliberate goal: to make Japanese wine from Japanese grapes that could stand alongside international benchmarks.

From the beginning, this was a winery with conviction. Not a novelty, not an experiment. A statement of what Japanese viticulture could become.

More than sixty years later, Manns Wines Katsunuma Winery remains one of the best-known names in Yamanashi wine. Its home is Katsunuma, at the centre of the region where the Koshu grape has grown for more than a thousand years.

The Koshu Grape and What It Takes to Work With It

Koshu is one of the most unusual winegrape varieties in the world (our Koshu wine guide goes further). Its skin is thicker than most white varieties, its colour ranges from pale gold to a faint salmon pink, and its flavour profile is delicate in a way that demands precision from the winemaker. It does not announce itself. It suggests.

Manns Wines has spent decades working to express Koshu honestly — across different styles of vinification, different levels of oak influence, different approaches to the texture and weight of the finished wine. Their work with growers in Katsunuma and across the prefecture has helped shape what Yamanashi wine means to the international market.

The winery also works extensively with Muscat Bailey A, a hybrid variety developed in Japan in the early twentieth century, whose deep red wines carry a distinctive softness that has come to represent Japanese red winemaking. Both varieties are registered with the International Organisation of Vine and Wine — a formal recognition of their distinctly Japanese character.

What a Private Visit Looks Like

A Wintage Tour visit to Manns Wines Katsunuma Winery is arranged privately and in English. What can be experienced depends on the season and on what the winery is doing on the day — so each visit is shaped around the time of year, and we offer as many experience elements as that moment allows.

Depending on the timing, a visit may include time to see the vineyard and the place where the wine is made, a tasting of the wines, and, where possible, a conversation with someone who makes the wine. The details are agreed with the winery beforehand and confirmed with you before you travel.

Katsunuma: A Town Built Around Wine

To understand Manns Wines, it helps to understand Katsunuma. This is not simply a place where wine happens to be made. It is a town — tucked into the eastern edge of the Kofu Basin, ringed by mountains on three sides — that has organized itself around viticulture for more than a millennium.

The Koshu grape is thought to have arrived here from Central Asia, traveling along the Silk Road sometime during the Heian period. It adapted to the conditions of the basin over centuries: the abundant sunshine, the significant diurnal temperature range, the rivers that drain from the Southern Alps and keep the valley floor from becoming too wet for fine viticulture. By the time Western-style winemaking techniques arrived in Japan in the late nineteenth century, Katsunuma already had what no other location in the country could offer — a local grape with deep roots and a terroir shaped by a thousand years of cultivation.

Manns Wines arrived into that legacy and chose to extend it rather than replace it. The winery's commitment to Japanese varieties, to local growers, to a home in Katsunuma, is a form of faith in what this particular place can produce.

When to Visit

Yamanashi wine country is beautiful at every point in the year, but two seasons carry particular weight.

Autumn, from late September through November, is harvest season. The vineyards are in motion — grapes being cut, transport arriving, fermentation beginning. The winery is at its most alive. The air in Katsunuma carries the faint, sweet ferment of new wine. If you want to see the process at its most kinetic, this is the time.

Spring, from March through May, offers something quieter. The vines are budding, the mountains still carry winter snow, and the pace inside the winery has settled into the steady work of ageing and bottling. The tasting room is less crowded. The wines have had time to develop.

Both seasons pair naturally with other experiences in Yamanashi — a morning at Kisvin Winery, a visit to Katsunuma Winery — Aruga Branca — or, for those staying overnight, a dinner in Kofu or a visit to Shichiken in the mountains above Hakushū.

Arriving From Tokyo

Katsunuma is approximately ninety minutes from central Tokyo by private car — a drive that takes you from the density of the city into mountain country with a speed that continues to surprise first-time visitors. The road passes through the Chuo Expressway, climbs into the Otsuki area, and arrives in the Kofu Basin with the mountains already visible on three sides.

Wintage Tour provides private transport for all Yamanashi experiences. Guests are collected from their hotel in Tokyo and returned the same evening, or at the conclusion of an overnight stay in the region.

There is no requirement to navigate public transport schedules, rental cars, or luggage logistics. The journey, like the visit itself, is taken care of.

For a broader view of what a Yamanashi day looks like, see our guide to Yamanashi winery tours from Tokyo, or browse our notes on the best time to visit Japan for sake and wine tours.

A Name Worth Knowing

Manns Wines is a name worth knowing — not because it is the most boutique, or the most limited, or the most difficult to access, but because what it has built over six decades represents something genuine: a serious, long-term commitment to Japanese wine, made from Japanese grapes, in the place where Japanese viticulture began.

To visit it privately, in English, with time to understand what you are tasting and why it matters — that is the kind of experience that changes the way you think about Japanese wine.

That is what Wintage Tour is here for.

Interested in visiting Manns Wines Katsunuma Winery as part of a private Yamanashi experience? Get in touch to discuss dates and arrange your visit.