A Single Rose Blooming at the Winery

This fiscal year, we entered into an equity partnership with Bulichella, a winery in Suvereto, Tuscany.

The connection goes back to the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and Korea, when my father helped bring the Italian national football team to Sendai for its training camp. That led to my younger brother studying in Italy, and the relationship we kept up with a company in Turin ever since is what made this partnership possible.

I hope to tell you more about it another time, but there is something I noticed while visiting many wineries since last year.

At the entrance to the vineyards, there are beautiful roses in bloom.

At first I assumed it was just an Italian touch of style. It was nothing of the sort.
Roses, it turns out, wither quickly unless the soil around them is kept in clean, healthy condition.

So a winery with roses in full bloom is sending a hidden message:
“the soil in our vineyards is clean.”

Isn’t there something quietly profound about that?

This partnership is not simply a matter of our company buying wine from overseas and selling it.

Rather than one-way imports, we want in time to bring products rooted in Tohoku’s culture — sake included — to a wider world.

And I wanted our employees to go there themselves and absorb as much as they can.

With wine, there is an unspoken rule of matching by color — red with meat, white with seafood, and so on.

But when you actually go there, you find pairings designed around the local dishes people enjoy, and the order and weight of the wines planned to follow the course of the meal. There is an enormous amount to learn.

The roses at the winery are the same. Unless you go there, wonder about them, and take the step of asking, you will never learn the truth behind them.

Someone who has never been abroad crosses the sea, sees that country’s culture, values, and streetscapes,
and takes in a great deal.

Seeing, hearing, and feeling it with your own senses.

As it once was for me, what you learn, notice, and experience overseas is irreplaceable.

A domestic company from Tohoku, crossing the sea together with its employees to take on a new challenge.

That is what I want to show you.