The vineyards are on the land that could not be made into rice fields. Sloping ground between the flats and the mountains, draining too freely for paddy, wrong for the crop that everything else here is organised around. Grapes went in instead.

It began in the late nineteenth century, when the country was setting up experimental orchards as a matter of national policy. Phylloxera arrived and knocked it flat. It came back anyway, and by 1950 this was the third largest growing area in the country.

For a long time that meant Delaware and Campbell Early, table grapes pressed into other service. From around 1980 the vinifera varieties went in — chardonnay, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon — and a growers' association formed here in 1984. The wines run to bright acidity and a cool finish rather than to weight: the whites carry a good deal of acid, the reds a fresh acidity with the tannin kept quiet behind it.

In June 2021 the name of the prefecture — the whole of it, not one valley — was registered as an origin for wine, on the same day as Nagano and Osaka. It took a little over a century for the slopes that were no good for rice to acquire a name of their own.