Date and time: Saturday, January 2018, 6 16: 11-00: 13
Location: Kawachi Wine Museum, Habikino City
Participation: 9 people (4 members, 5 non-members)

This year's Kansai facility tour visited Kawachi Wine (founded in 1934 and now the 4th generation) in Habikino City, Osaka.The weather was not good until the day before, but at that time it was also blessed.

Mr. Kawachi, Managing Director of Wine, explained along the winemaking process (grape selection ⇒ squeezing ⇒ fermentation ⇒ aging ⇒ bottling).

Grape selection: Determines the acidity, which is an important point of wine, and depends largely on the quality of the grapes.Therefore, the supplier changes every year.By the way, he also showed an episode that Delaware, which is familiar with JSPE, overturned the dogma that the native Delaware variety is not suitable for making delicious wine.
Squeezing: Remove the stems from the grapes and mechanically squeeze the juice (pre-fermented before squeezing to produce red wine).Since the taste of wine juice deteriorates when it oxidizes, we use a squeezer made by Bucher of Switzerland, which does not easily contain air in the process from squeezing to filling in a fermentation tank.
Fermentation: The sugar contained in fruit juice is fermented with yeast and decomposed into carbon dioxide and alcohol.Before fermentation is complete, sparkling contains carbon dioxide (= carbonic acid).If the yeast used for fermentation is 100% natural, it does not have excellent storage stability, so it is often used in combination.

Aging: After fermentation, the grapes are barreled and flavored, but some are not flavored, such as Bojore Nuvo (By the way, Bojore Nubo served a tasting to check the grapes of the year at the harvest festival. It was the origin).The barrel is made by adjusting the material (basically oak, but it is made of cedar for Japanese food, or the same oak uses different grain details depending on the growing climate) and the degree of baking inside.Insufficient cleaning in the barrel will ruin it.

If you think of winemaking as engineering, you will break down sugar into alcohol with yeast.It is very simple to write in letters, but unlike industrial products, the quality of the raw material (grape) cannot be homogenized no matter how careful you are.However, by adjusting according to the grapes of the year, we guarantee a certain level as a product, which can be said to be the same idea as our engineers who handle industrial products.

After the tour, we had lunch and wine tasting at the winery's directly managed restaurant "Kinshokudo" to deepen our friendship.The number of participants this time is not large at 9, but I think it is a big step forward that not only JSPE members but also colleagues of non-member companies and their families participated.In the future, I would like to plan an event where not only members but also families can interact.

(JSPE Planning Subcommittee: Nishikubo)