■Vins Fins MOTOHAMA

"Vins Fins Motohama" (ヴァンファン本浜) is a Japanese-French company funded in April 2009. We propose in Japan a select list of French terroir wines. We sell wines directly to customers and to restaurants and professional retailers. We are present in France where we constantly seek for quality wines and new producers.

Our passion
The terroirs of France. We like wines that reflect the nature of their soil, known as terroir in French. The concept of terroir is at the heart of the French wine culture. There are multiple official wine names in France (A.O.C.), each of them corresponding to a terroir and a particular taste and style. We offer exceptional terroir wines.

Who are we?
Vincent Schmitt : "After doing research in Mathematics in France and in the UK for 15 years, we started the wine business in 2009 with my japanese wife Yoko Motohama. I have always been a wine lover and being french, I look for top quality wines in France."
Yoko Motohama : "I did scientific research for 12 years in Europe: Italy, UK and eventually France. I have been also working as a translator into italian, french and english... I fell in love with european culture, in particular french joie de vivre, food and wine. Therefore I decided to import french wines in Japan with my french husband."

Our selection process
We only select wines that we love.

We visit winemakers to understand first hand their method and vision. When we taste their wines we check that flavors reflect their work as expected.

We have been working with knowledgable and very talented winemakers who design classical wines, rather than exotic ones that are unrelated to the terroir.

We prefer handcrafted wines rather than industrial ones. We prefer small producers who take great care of their own limited number of barrels.

We think the wine making process should be gentle with less human intervention as possible to preserve the complexity of what Nature has created. According to our experience we prefer by far fermentations from indigenous yeasts (i.e. without added yeasts).

We do not appreciate overworked wines. They are often designed to impress a targeted audience but in doing so they lose their complexity.

Our prices
We buy directly from producers thus do not pay intermediaries. On the other hand there is a price for quality wines. For instance handpicking and carefully selecting grapes has a cost far superior to a mechanical harvest. It turns out that good bottles are never the cheapest ones... Also careful transportation and storage are costly but necessary to preserve the wines’ quality.

We do not cut corners in providing wines and offer them at a fair price.

Our advices
Many parameters can make the wine tasting experience successful:
- Different people have different tastes
- Good wines are sometimes fragile. They can be also be tricky: they have their own lives with highs and lows. Anyway they are well worth the effort.

We are happy to guide you!

Yoko and Rie Motohama and Vincent Schmitt.

■Photo gallery

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