Nobuari Soga was having dinner at the home of his friend Jirka Wein, when the Czech stove artisan poured a wine of a kind the young man had never tasted before.
It was an organic Japanese wine that expressed a distinctive character different from the mass-market French or Italian wines he had been used to in Tokyo, where he played in an indie rock band and worked in insurance.
Soga had just returned to his home village of Nakagawa, at the foot of Japan’s southern Alps, to take up farming after a stretch of urban life that began with his studies at Yokohama University. It was the year after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and Soga felt the pull of a simpler way of life.