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Concha y Toro partners with Kirin on Japanese wine brand
Chilean wine giant Concha y Toro has launched a collaboration with Kirin-owned wine brand Mercian to make Japanese wine more accessible.
The new collaboration between Viña Concha y Toro’s and Mercian, dubbed the Pacific Link Project, will see the two companies create wines from Chile and Japan, where the businesses are respectively based.
Chateau Mercian, one of Japan’s leading wine brands, aims to improve its global reach via the project with Concha y Toro, one of the 10 largest wine companies in the world.
Winemakers from Chile and Japan will travel between the two countries throughout the year, producing one Japanese wine during September and one Chilean wine in March. The aim of the Pacific Link Project is to make Japanese wines more attractive in Japan and abroad and Chilean wines more premium in Japan.
“The harvest and vinification time [for grapes] is March in Chile and September in Japan, so in March the focus will be to make a new Chilean wine with a powerful flavour concurring with the spring season, whereas in September the focus will be on making a Japanese wine concurring with the Autumn season,” Viña Concha y Toro regional director for Asia Pacific Guy Nusset told FoodNavigator-Asia.
The project’s first release is a Japanese wine called Chateau Mercian Iwade Koshu Amicis. Made with native Koshu grapes, the wine was released in Japan on 2 April and will be launched in Singapore in the spring.
Nusset explained that in order to appeal to a global audience, the wine’s naturally high acidity has been reduced. “We have first focused on the development of a Japanese wine during the 2023 autumn season, and utilised Concha y Toro knowledge of the global wine market to create a variant with a flavour balance that is more acceptable to global consumers than current variants.”
Mercian marketing department general manager Aya Jindo added: “before this, Mercian products have been very much catered to the Japanese palate with much higher acidity. Based on advice from Concha y Toro, we will be lowering this to moderate acidity to better appeal to a wider audience as well as domestic consumers.”
The aim of the project is to increase Mercian’s exports by 1.4x in value compared with 2023 numbers, which consisted of around 12,000 litres worldwide. Sales of Mercian wines reached ¥1 billion for the first time in 2023. The Kirin-owned wine company exports to markets including the UK, the US, Hong Kong, and Singapore, we newly started exporting to Italy in 2023.
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