The dot-com era saw an unfortunate number of foreign wine promoters descend on Japan. They were armed with snappy Powerpoint presentations and talk of quick riches, but their only apparent success was in relieving investors of their excess cash before moving on.

In contrast, there are a handful of foreign wine specialists in Japan who started out simply as passionate wine lovers but ended up building their hobbies into thriving long-term businesses. The undisputed godfather of this group of importers is Australian wine specialist Village Cellars.

We recently made a pilgrimage to meet Village Cellars' founder Richard Cohen at his headquarters deep in the countryside of Toyama Prefecture, not far from where the Noto Peninsula juts out into the Sea of Japan.

Surrounded by an ultra-modern 20,000-case warehouse and staff of 25, Cohen explained, "This really all began late one night in the middle of the Australian desert 35 years ago."

Cohen was training as a mining engineer on a university program that required students to work four months per year in the field. At a loose end in the middle of the desert, most students worked double, 16-hour shifts even though the work was, as Cohen describes it, "mind-numbingly dull."

"I drove a nice drilling rig with an air-conditioned cab, but once I set the controls for the next point, unless the alarm went off, I didn't have anything to do for an hour."

With an eye toward his next possible mining assignment, Cohen wanted to study Indonesian to pass the time, but the only language books in the company library were Japanese, so Japanese it was. This eventually led to a two-year stint in Japan for further study before returning to the mines, this time in Bougainville, New Guinea, and this time with Japanese girlfriend, Yoshiko, in tow.

"During our eight years in New Guinea, Yoshiko and I married and settled down, but, as the political situation there worsened, we began to look for an exit."

Yoshiko's father ran a small metal alloy consultancy located among the foundries of Toyama, and offered to bring them into the family business. Richard and Yoshiko signed on, established a mining equipment-oriented export subsidiary, and eventually built their own house in Toyama in 1987.

"I always loved wine, and once we had the house built and actually had some space to store it, we decided to import 20 cases to celebrate."

They poured wine for everyone who came to see the new house [the first Western-style home in the area], and, Cohen explains, "Our friends said that this was the first wine that they actually found enjoyable to drink, and begged us to import more."

One of their friends owned a sake factory that had been abandoned 30 years earlier. It was naturally cool, structurally sound and, most importantly, it had a still-valid Meiji Era alcohol license.

"It was the barest scrap of yellowed paper," Cohen explained, but regardless of its antiquated appearance, it allowed them to circumvent the labyrinthine licensing system, so they were able to immediately begin importing and selling wine.

The wine import business started out as a fun hobby, with Cohen slipping in winery visits between sales calls to his various mining customers. But it grew nicely and acted as a "natural hedge" against their currency-sensitive export business.

After three years of working the mining-supply business by day and the wine business by night, the Cohens finally decided to move completely into wine, establishing Village Cellars KK in 1991. They quickly branched out from the original mail-order business, adding restaurant supply and wholesale operations.

They ran this for eight more years from the original sake factory, adding floors, propping up beams and patching roofs. But, according to Cohen, it was "a nightmare."

"We couldn't get a forklift inside, so every case was hand-stacked, and we had to move each box at least five times between the container arriving and the case finally being sent out to the customer. Our backs were killing us."

With a view toward their long-term health, and a potential partner waiting in the wings who hoped to do a higher volume of business than the sake warehouse could support, in 1999, they decided to move.

The new, custom-built warehouse is a wine-lover's dream, with 20,000 cases stacked to the heavens, hydraulic people lifts, and just about every customized feature for storing and packing wine imaginable.

Soon after the move, the Cohens sold 50 percent of the mail-order business to Cellarmasters, a large direct-marketing outfit (and subsidiary of brewing giant Fosters) which claims responsibility for one in every 11 bottles of wine sold in Australia.

The Cohens retain 100 percent of the restaurant supply and wholesale businesses, but found that the tie-up on the mail-order side (now run under a separate legal entity called KK Wine Buzz) was too good to refuse.

"Cellarmasters produces an enormous number of private labels that are for sale only to their mail-order customers. Since there are no marketing costs associated with these wines, they offer much better value to the end consumer," explained Cohen.

Additionally, shifting the mail-order business to private labels avoids channel conflict -- customers can't walk into a shop or restaurant and spy a familiar bottle and say, "Hey, I can buy that directly from Village Cellars."

"We direct new customers to the private labels," Cohen said, "but collectors who ask can still access our full catalog, including Peter Lehman, Yarra Ridge, Yellowglen, d'Arnberg, Leeuwin Estate and a number of other benchmark Australian wines."

Cohen is concerned about the recent surge in popularity of awamori and other alcoholic drinks among younger Japanese. Also worrying him is the strong Australian dollar, up nearly 25 percent in the last two years. Then there is the not-totally-undeserved image of Australia mainly as a supplier of "plonk" -- customs data show that the average value for all the Aussie wine imported into Japan in 2004, including Village Cellars' higher-end offerings, amounted to less than 370 yen per bottle.

Yet business continues to boom for Village, with sales on track to reach 50,000 cases this year -- not a bad result at all for a passionate couple who started with a few cases and a dream in 1987.

For a copy of the Village Cellars catalog, contact them on (0120) 106-876. Please send questions or feedback to [email protected]

The secret lies down under

Wine lovers who live or work near the up-and-coming Atago area of Tokyo will be pleased to know that Shoko Davis, owner and manager of Restaurant and Wine Cellar Davis in Takanawa, Shinagawa Ward, has opened a second outlet just two blocks from Atago Green Hills.

The original Davis in Takanawa has long been a haunt of local wine lovers and off-duty sommeliers, albeit in an almost impossible to find location.

The new Davis Too has a much more casual, cafe-like interior, but features many of the same great dishes (including a gorgonzola pasta described by one fan as "pure evil").

The very low-key atmosphere and lack of any apparent wine cellar makes the extensive wine list -- 125 offerings from 12 different countries -- all the more surprising. But the secret is revealed after you order a bottle and see the staff crawl through a Hobbit-sized door under the stairway, then negotiate their way down a precarious ladder to fetch it from a basement cave.

For those who'd like to try a wine that is also made Down Under, interesting Australian selections range between good value Margaret River bottlings from Vasse Felix and Cullen, all the way up to a '93 Grange. Enjoy!

Wine Cellar Davis, 2-5-6 Takanawa-ku, [03] 3440-6007; Davis Too, 3-13-4 Nishi-Shimbashi-ku, [03] 3433-4321