Hamada Vineyard is a small, family-run vineyard on the hills of Tappu, in the city of Mikasa, in Hokkaido’s Sorachi subprefecture — a quietly emerging pocket of Japanese wine country east of Sapporo. The vineyard and winery are tended by just three family members, including Mr. Hamada, who works as a neurologist and runs the vineyard alongside his medical career.

Vines were planted in the mid-2010s, and the vineyard brought in its first harvest in the autumn of 2018 — three years after planting. That first crop became Hamada Vineyard’s debut release in autumn 2019. In 2021, Hamada Vineyard joined forces with a fellow Mikasa grower, Miyamoto Vineyard, to build their own winery, called Domaine Tapukoline, named for the Tappu hillside where both families farm. Everything before 2021 was made off-site; since then, each vintage has been fermented, aged, and bottled at the family’s own facility.

The estate grows a notably wide range of both white and black grape varieties on a small footprint, releasing single-variety wines when volumes allow and blending across varieties in leaner years — as happened in 2023, when an unusually hot, late autumn kept migratory thrushes from moving south, and the resulting bird damage sharply cut yields of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc; nearly all of that year’s white and red grapes ended up blended into the Blanc and Rouge instead of varietal bottlings. By 2024 the vineyard bounced back to a record harvest, added new staff, and is continuing to expand — roughly 1,300 new vines were planted in spring 2025 alone.