Yokohama Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Yoshiko Machida spent some twenty years with WWF, mostly explaining how everyday life damages the environment, until she felt she could not keep saying it without having made anything herself. In 2017 she began making wine in part of a former restaurant beside Yokohama’s harbour; the winery stands about a metre and a half from the water.

Much of Japan’s wine country stays warm and wet all summer, so its two signature grapes both have thick skins against rot. Koshu, pink-skinned and grown mostly in Yamanashi, makes dry, very light whites. Muscat Bailey A is the red, a hybrid bred in 1927 by Zenbei Kawakami in Niigata by crossing Bailey with Muscat Hamburg. It gives soft, light, juicy reds that smell of strawberries, and the closest comparison is Beaujolais. Since 2018 only wine from grapes grown in Japan may be sold as Japan Wine, and every bottle Machida makes is one.

Most of her grapes come from growers she has visited: Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay from a couple who moved from Yokohama to Azumino in Nagano, Delaware from Takahata in Yamagata. They ferment on wild yeasts, with no added sugar and no filtering. Aldebaran, the Muscat Bailey A that took Gold at Kura Master 2026, was grown at Aono in Okayama.

In 2020 Machida planted about 400 vines of her own, mostly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, on abandoned farmland in Asahi ward. Yokohama is hot and humid, and when disease first showed, the advice she got was to spray; she was aiming for organic certification instead. The nonprofit Organic Agriculture Certification Association now certifies the vineyard (NA-22122301, since December 2022) and the winery to make organic wine (NB-23091901, since September 2023). Only the wines made entirely from her Yokohama grapes carry the organic JAS seal, starting with Carnival in 2024; the rest of the range, Aldebaran included, is not sold as organic.