Coco Farm & Winery
Although we’d heard of the place before, for some reason we’d never made the trip. At the encouragement of a young friend of ours, we finally decided to make the trek to Ashikaga to visit Coco Farm & Winery. Thanks to the Kita-kanto Expressway, the entire “trek” took about an hour from “downtown” Maebashi.
Coco Farm & Winery was started more than fifty years ago, by Noboru Kawada, as a facility to care for 9 people with mental disabilities. Kawada is still the principal, but these days it is home to 130 such persons (aged 18-87) and 20 staff. The history of how a struggling school turned into a profitable winery and managed to achieve its goals for its students is an inspiring one, and you’ll enjoy reading about it on the official website–in excellent English. Read both “Vineyard News” and “Brief History.”
We went partly out of curiosity to see what sort of new occupations had been devised for persons with disabilities, but were quickly charmed by the atmosphere and forgot all about our “research.” We walked around and shopped in the gift shop for a while, then took the 10:30 tour of the winery (500 yen, in Japanese), and were back in time for lunch in the cafe. We had the “deck lunch” on the deck (of course), no more than a few yards from the mountain on which Coco grapes are grown. Lunch was light, but fresh and delicious, and extremely reasonable. With dessert and a little wine, it was a whopping 3500 yen for two. The wine on sale in the gift shop is also reasonably priced; in fact the whole experience was such a bargain that we decided that we didn’t mind paying for the tour–during which we learned everything we wanted to know about Coco Farm specifically and wine making in general.
One astonishing fact was that the place has been “organic” from the outset. The school had no money to buy pesticides or to go otherwise hi-tech, and they have raised all of their crops naturally using chiefly human power since the 1950s, long before it was stylish to do so. I could go on and on, but I’ll post some photos here and let you get the rest of the information from the Coco Farm & Winery website! (If you put your mouse over the photos, the titles will come up. Click to see them larger.)
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