Tsunagu - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Tsunagu

by W. Blake Gray • April 11, 2018

Tsunagu is a wine bar that sells only Japanese wine, which is unusual because Japanese wine traditionally hasn’t been very good. You might feel trepidation if owner Satoko Tamura produces a sake-sized screw-capped bottle and pours the wine into an opaque Japanese-style teacup, rather than a glass. But trust him: That wine—Asaya Koshu 2016—is unfi ltered and slightly cloudy, with an apple character reminiscent of viognier. Tamura looks hard for Japan’s best bottles; for instance, red wine isn’t normally Japan’s strength, thanks to a month-long rainy season in summer, but Tamura taps Hokkaido, the northernmost and chilliest island, where summer is drier, for bottles such as Hokkaido Wine Zweigelt 2015, a peppery, lively red at just 11.5 percent alcohol. It’s nearly impossible to find outside of Tsunagu, which opened in May with a short menu of bar food, like cracker-thin pizza with shirasu fish and wasabi nori.

2-9-1 Hamamatsucho, Takahashi 3rd Building B1, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan

Wine Bar

+81 03-6721-5019

facebook.com/tsunagunihonwine

W. Blake Gray

W. Blake Gray lived in Tokyo for eight years before moving to San Francisco, where he became an award-winning wine and spirits journalist. He is the US Editor for Wine Searcher and runs the Gray Report blog. He still travels to Tokyo frequently to drink and eat and drink.

This story appears in the print issue of April 2018.
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David Paradela
Associate Editor

David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Tastings Editor

Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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Patricio Tapia
Senior Correspondent

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.