Featured

grapes

Can we pick out the expensive Japanese grapes in a blind taste test?

Luxury fruit goes head-to-head with a supermarket bunch.

Read More

Our 40-year-old reporter tries muscat grapes for the first time, conquers childhood trauma

Seiji Nakazawa discovers that grapes have come a long way in the past 30 years.

Read More

Lindt’s new “Nagano Purple” celebrates a rare luxury Japanese grape variety

Introducing Japan to a new world of fruit flavour.

Read More

Drinking wine made from the only train station platform vineyard in Japan

This Shiojiri Station Merlot has a terroir as unique as its taste. 

Read More

Japanese train station grows wine grapes on the platform

Wait for your train under the shade of Japan’s only train station platform vineyard.

Read More

Fukuoka senior arrested for stealing a single grape, denies charges

He probably would have gotten away with it too if he didn’t insist on peeling the darn thing.

Read More

7-Eleven sells grapes with skins you can actually eat! We kid you not

Back where I come from, it wasn’t uncommon to pick a grape off its stem and pop it right into your mouth without a second’s thought. The very idea of peeling a grape was something along the lines of a diva demanding a bottled-milk bath while dining on a bowl of only red-colored Skittles.

However, in Japan, where many varieties of grape have thick or rubbery skins, peeling them is pretty much standard. In fact, whenever I eat a grape with its skin intact, I’m stared at as if I had just plucked a live spider off the wall and ate it.

That’s probably why 7-Eleven can get away with marketing their frozen bags of grapes as having “edible skins” here.

Read More