/ Markets
Japan imports around 70% of the wine it drinks, and EU wine now enters tariff-free. Here is how the market works and how European producers find an importer.
/ The short version
Japan is one of the most rewarding wine markets in Asia, and one of the most demanding. Around seventy percent of the wine drunk there is imported, France leads by value, and the audience is famously precise. Buyers ask about soil and elevation before they ask about price. For a producer who takes their craft seriously, that is a market worth the effort.
It is also one of the few large markets moving the right way. In 2025, while volume eased slightly, the value of Japan's wine imports rose. People bought a little less and paid a little more, which is the premiumization pattern playing out in a market that already prizes quality. For a small estate selling on character rather than price, that is exactly the current to be swimming with.
If you make wine in the EU, the door is wider than you might think. Under the Economic Partnership Agreement between the EU and Japan, which came into force in February 2019, tariffs on EU wine were removed entirely and immediately, not phased in over years. Your wine lands on the same footing as the French houses that have dominated Japanese shelves for decades. New World producers, by contrast, still pay duty unless their own country has struck a deal. That is a structural advantage worth using while it is fresh, and worth stating plainly when you pitch, because a Japanese importer's margins are tight and a tariff-free landed cost is a real argument in your favor.
Japan has roughly 250 wine importers and distributors. Old World wine is the default, but New World labels and value formats are gaining ground, and a domestic Japanese wine scene is growing fast in Hokkaido, Yamanashi, and Nagano. The serious wine business concentrates in the cities, Tokyo and Osaka above all, with the department-store food halls, specialist retailers, and a deep restaurant culture all part of the route to the drinker. Gift-giving seasons matter more here than almost anywhere, which rewards wines that present well and carry a story a buyer can repeat.
The importer handles the Japanese-side work, including the Japanese-language labeling applied to your bottles after they arrive, plus customs and the food-sanitation paperwork. Your role is the wine, the documentation, and the story that an importer can carry into a market that genuinely wants to hear it. Precise technical sheets, accurate analysis, and a clear account of your farming and your cellar are not box-ticking here; they are the language the buyer thinks in.
Precision and patience. This is a relationship market, not a transactional one. Importers want detail, consistency, and a producer who respects the care they put into placing a wine. They are slower to commit than some markets and far more loyal once they do, and a first order is often deliberately small, a test of both the wine and the working relationship before anything larger follows. Treat that small order as the start of something rather than a disappointment, because in Japan it usually is.
The mistake producers make is treating Japan like a volume play. It rewards the opposite: a considered approach, the right importer for your style, and the willingness to let a relationship build over visits and vintages.
Buyers ask about soil and elevation before they ask about price.
Japanese importers work on tight margins and think in landed yen, so a clean, tariff-free price you can hold steady across vintages counts for more than a flashy one-off discount. Expect a first order to be small and specific, often a few cases of one or two wines rather than a pallet of the whole range, placed to test how the wine sells through before anything scales. The restaurant trade is central to that test: a sommelier pouring your wine by the glass, with the story told at the table, is often how an unfamiliar producer builds a following that then pulls retail along behind it. Supply consistency is part of the deal. An importer who lists you is betting that next year's wine will arrive on time and taste like the same estate, so reliability is itself a selling point here.
Start where the fit is obvious. Look at who already imports wines like yours, which a Japanese retailer's back label or a wine-pricing site will tell you, and approach importers whose existing book sits next to yours in region, style, and price rather than firing at the whole list of 250. The big international and domestic food and drink trade fairs held in Japan draw these buyers specifically to discover new producers, and being present, or being represented, at one is among the most efficient ways to be taken seriously. Failing that, a precise, well-documented direct approach to a genuinely matched importer, followed up consistently rather than once, is what opens the door.
Find the importer whose book already speaks your language, reach them properly, and let the relationship build at the pace Japan expects. Few markets reward that patience as well, or stay loyal as long once you have earned it.