Last month we hosted 22 Japanese visitors (mainly sommeliers) at Misha’s Vineyard for an afternoon tour and tasting along with the President of our Japanese distributor, Masumoto-san.

We split the group into two and while one half enjoyed a wine tasting in Ah Foo’s house which Cassy and I hosted, the other half enjoyed a tour around the vineyard with Andy and Rich. During the tasting we started with Pinot Noir, the most savoury of our wines, and then took the group through our range of white aromatic wines. It was the perfect time to be trying the refreshing flavours of our aromatics in the late afternoon sun. There were many girls in our group of sommeliers and we noticed that they took a lot more photos when Rich was talking about the vineyard on the tour!

This was the first time we had used Ah Foo’s house as a ‘wine-tasting’ venue. We’ve done a lot of work with the restoration of this old goldminer’s ruins and it’s now an ideal place to hold a wine-tasting on the vineyard. Our visitors seemed to enjoy having the tasting out in the vineyard in a part of the region’s “history”.

Although it was wonderful weather being out in the sun proved a little too hot for some of our visitors so we gave everyone a Misha’s Vineyard cap to wear whilst enjoying the tour of the vineyard.

It was fantastic to have so many people from Japan to come and try the wines and be able to see our very special location at Misha’s Vineyard. Thanks to Seino-san, a sommelier from Apicius in Tokyo, who helped with translating during the tastings and a very big thanks to Nagano-san, the CEO of Jiyugaoka Wine School, for these great photos.