First contact with candidate producers
We are in touch with two houses in Kakheti and are discussing sample shipments.
Georgia is held to be the birthplace of wine, and the method is still alive there: qvevri, earthenware vessels buried in the ground. Skins and seeds ferment together, so white grapes yield an amber wine.
The company running this is Kyokuchifu Inc. Its representative is Hiroyuki Fukuda, who is also an officer of USONO inc. His day job is meteorology — he is a certified forecaster and delivers weather commentary on NHK radio. Wine import and sales has been part of Kyokuchifu's stated business from the start, and it holds the liquor licence. Nobody is starting to move alcohol on a whim here.
*Kyokuchifu* is the meteorological term for a local wind — the wind that only a particular landform produces. It is the name a forecaster gave his own company. Just as there are winds that blow in one valley and nowhere else, there are flavours that come from one producer and nowhere else. Those are what we are carrying.
We are after three or four producers making a few thousand bottles a year. It is precisely because that is too small for the big agencies that going in person means something.
The money goes to the purchase itself, freight, customs and liquor tax. Wine import is paid up front; the money is needed before the ship leaves. A small shop doing this out of its own pocket gets one failure and is finished.
The bottles will be opened at the Cafe & Bar of Uso no Tobacco Shop, and also sent out whole.
[This page is a prototype. All amounts, specs, and dates are placeholders.]