Traveling into the Shiobara Valley by bus, visitors are assailed by the rich, intensely cultivated fields of Nasunogahara. The reformations that characterized Japan's Meiji Era (1868 -1912) were not confined to political or social change, the volcanic wasteland of Nasunogahara undergoing a transformation of its own in the early 1800s, as settlers from former noble families began cultivating European-style grapes here.