How fast are new Japanese wine producers appearing?

Counting licence dates instead of founding years The National Tax Agency publishes a list of businesses that have newly obtained a liquor production licence, with the name, the address of the production site and the date of the licence. The table below takes the rows whose category includes fruit wine and matches them against the producers listed here.

These figures differ from founding years because they do not come from the producer. A founding year is something a producer reports, so it cannot be counted when nothing is published, and what counts as the founding varies from person to person. A licence date is recorded by the state, independent of the producer's intent or memory.

What is not being counted The list only covers licences newly granted from 2014 onward. Producers already making wine before that do not appear in it. The earliest year in the table looks small not because few producers existed then, but because the list begins there.

Rows categorised as transfers, incorporations, business transfers or inheritances are excluded. Each records a licence moving to a different name or a different place, and none of them means production started that year. Trial licences are excluded too, since they are not licences for commercial production.

A licence date is also not an opening date. Some producers obtain a licence late in the year and open the following year, so the licence year and the year the doors opened can differ by one.

The producers that could not be matched Only about half of the producers listed here appear in this table. The rest either predate 2014 or could not be linked to a name in the list. Licences are usually recorded under a corporate name, which often shares no characters with the trading name a producer is known by. Names that do not match are also looked up by address, and some still remain unmatched.

Our reading: this table is evidence that Japanese wine is growing, but it is not suited to comparing the rate of growth with other countries or other drinks. That would need a denominator — how many producers closed — and that is not published in the same form. What it does show is that a steady number of new licences appears every year.