Two men in the town of Kofu: a Buddhist priest and a merchant. As a young man the priest had been to Yokohama and watched foreigners drinking wine. He went home and began trying to make it. This was the early 1870s, and the account says they adapted what they knew about brewing sake.

By 1873 they were buying empty bottles cheaply from liquor merchants in the foreign settlement at Yokohama, corking them and sealing the necks with wax so the contents did not meet the air. A government survey the following year records about 860 litres of white and about 1,800 litres of red made in Yamanashi, which is taken to be their output. The red came from wild mountain grapes, the white from grapes grown at Katsunuma.

Koshu, the variety the region is now known for, has a thin purple skin that gives up almost no colour. Pressed and fermented, it makes a white wine, which is not what the colour of the fruit leads you to expect.

The idea of making a Japanese wine from Japanese grapes starts here, in a provincial town, with two men. Of the second of them, the merchant, almost nothing survives: not the dates of his birth or his death, only that he lived on a particular street in Kofu.