The Photographer & the Aperture

The story of Aperture Farm & Winery begins with a camera, not a vine. Ryo Tanabe was born in 1981 in Hasuda, Saitama Prefecture, and after studying photography at university in the United States, he returned to Japan with a portfolio of images and a skill that would prove unexpectedly transferable: English. The photography career did not take off as hoped — Tanabe recognised that making a living as a photographer in Japan would be difficult — but the language ability opened doors in international trade, and he found work at a trading company where he was exposed to wines from around the world. It was here, surrounded by bottles from France, Italy, California, and beyond, that Tanabe first developed a serious interest in wine — not as a beverage but as a cultural object, a product of place, and a medium of human creativity.

The shift from trading company to liquor store was a deliberate step closer to the source. Tanabe changed jobs to work at a wine-specialised liquor company, where he became responsible for Japanese wines — visiting wineries across the country, walking through vineyards, meeting growers and makers, and developing the relationships and the knowledge that would eventually inspire his own transition from seller to producer. As he travelled from Hokkaido to Yamanashi, from Nagano to Yamagata, Tanabe's interest gradually shifted from selling wine to making it. "I liked creating things," he recalls. "I wanted to put my own work into the world, rather than selling someone else's products." The sentiment is that of every artist who has moved from curation to creation — the desire not merely to appreciate and distribute but to originate, to make something that bears one's own signature and one's own vision.

The decisive turning point came at Nakazawa Vineyard in Hokkaido. Tanabe visited the estate and was struck — not merely impressed, but fundamentally altered — by the diversity of living organisms in the vineyard. The soil teemed with life: insects, microbes, fungi, plants, and the invisible biological networks that connect them into a functioning ecosystem. This was not the sterile, chemically managed vineyard of conventional agriculture; it was a living place, a system of interdependence and mutual support, and the grapes that grew from this soil carried the vitality of that system into the wine. Tanabe decided, in that moment, to become a vigneron — not a winemaker who buys grapes and manipulates them in a cellar, but a grower who tends vines, manages soil, and makes wine from the fruit of his own labour. The camera was set aside; the aperture shifted from light to life.

In 2010, Tanabe moved to Tomi City, Nagano Prefecture — a region known for its high number of sunny days, its cool climate, and its welcoming attitude toward new farmers. He began cultivating grapes in 2011, starting with a modest 90-are plot (0.9 hectares) and expanding over the years to the current ~1.7 hectares. For over a decade, he worked as a contract winemaker — producing wines under his own label but using other people's facilities — while he studied, experimented, and refined his techniques. He worked at Manns Wine during the winters to learn commercial winemaking, and simultaneously produced wines at Cave Hatano and Domaine Nakajima as a contract client, building the technical skills and the confidence that would allow him to eventually build his own facility. The self-imposed rule was strict: "I will not build my own winery until I can make wine with my own strength." In August 2022, that condition was met, and Aperture Farm & Winery opened its doors — a gravity-flow facility on a small hill in Netsu, Tomi City, with the winery on the ground floor and Tanabe's home above.

The winemaking at Aperture Farm & Winery is guided by a philosophy that Tanabe describes as being "honest with the wine you want to make" — a straightforward, unpretentious approach that prioritises the quality of the raw material over the complexity of the technique. Tanabe believes that 80–90% of a wine's character is determined at harvest, and his focus is therefore on cultivation rather than cellar manipulation. "If you try to fix things later, you end up feeling sorry for the grapes," he says. "I always think about what the grapes want to become." This is not a passive or lazy approach; it is a disciplined commitment to allowing the vineyard to express itself, to accepting the variations that each vintage brings, and to resisting the temptation to impose a predetermined style through chemical correction, flavour addition, or technological intervention. The grapes are the authors; Tanabe is the editor, selecting, shaping, and presenting their story with minimal alteration.

The fermentation at Aperture Farm is carried out with wild yeasts — the indigenous populations that live on the grape skins, in the vineyard environment, and in the winery itself. No selected, laboratory-cultured yeast strains are introduced. This spontaneous fermentation is the most natural form of winemaking, and it produces wines of greater complexity, greater individuality, and greater connection to place than commercial cultures can achieve. But it also requires constant vigilance: because wild yeasts are unpredictable and because Tanabe uses minimal or no sulphur dioxide, the wines must be monitored daily, tasted constantly, and managed with immediate responsiveness to any deviation from healthy fermentation. For this reason, the winery and Tanabe's home are combined in the same building — the ground floor is the cellar, the second floor is the residence — allowing him to check on his wines at any hour, to respond to temperature changes, to catch the early signs of problematic microbial activity, and to maintain the intimate, attentive relationship with the fermenting juice that natural winemaking demands.

The sulphur levels at Aperture Farm are minimal to zero — Tanabe aims to use as little sulphur dioxide as possible, and some cuvées are made entirely without it. This is not a dogmatic refusal of a useful tool but a preference for preserving the wine's natural vitality and allowing it to express its full, uncorrected character. The low-sulphur approach requires scrupulous hygiene, careful temperature management, and the kind of attentive monitoring that only a small, hands-on producer can provide. The result is wines that are alive, evolving, and sometimes unpredictable — wines that change in the bottle, that reward careful storage, and that offer a different experience with each pouring. The risk of instability is accepted as the price of authenticity, and Tanabe's skill as a winemaker is measured not by his ability to produce identical bottles year after year but by his ability to guide each vintage to its best expression while allowing it to remain true to its specific conditions.

The gravity-flow design of the winery is both practical and philosophical. The building is constructed so that forklifts can enter, allowing grapes and juice to be moved by gravity rather than by pumps — a gentle, non-invasive method that preserves the integrity of the fruit and minimises the mechanical stress that can extract harsh tannins or introduce unwanted oxygen. The ceiling is low because of the residence above, but the space is customised to Tanabe's needs: movable storage baskets on casters, specially designed tools, and a layout that allows one person to manage the entire operation. This is not a winery designed for visitors or for spectacle; it is a workspace designed for efficiency, for intimacy, and for the kind of hands-on labour that natural winemaking requires. The building is a tool, not a monument — and like every tool at Aperture Farm, it is chosen for its function rather than its appearance.

To understand Aperture Farm & Winery, one must understand the connection between the photographer's eye and the vigneron's hand — two modes of creative practice that Ryo Tanabe has united in a single, coherent vision. Photography, at its best, is not about capturing reality but about selecting from it — about framing a portion of the world, excluding the irrelevant, and presenting the essential in a form that allows others to see what the photographer sees. The aperture of a camera — the opening through which light passes — controls not merely exposure but focus, depth of field, and the relationship between subject and background. Tanabe's choice of "Aperture" as the name for his winery is deliberate and meaningful: it expresses his desire to focus fully on winemaking and vegetable farming, to open himself to the light and the life of the vineyard, and to create wines that are not merely products but compositions — carefully framed, attentively composed, and presented with the same aesthetic intentionality that guides a photographer's work.

The photographs on Aperture Farm's wine labels are taken by Tanabe himself, using his iPhone — a choice that reflects both his background as a photographer and his commitment to simplicity, accessibility, and the democratisation of creative tools. The images are not professional studio shots or elaborate marketing materials; they are personal, immediate, and authentic — snapshots of the vineyard, the grapes, the landscape, and the moments of daily life that constitute the reality of farming. The labels are an extension of Tanabe's artistic practice, a way of continuing to make images even as his primary medium has shifted from light to liquid. And they are a statement about the nature of craft in the digital age: that the tool is less important than the vision, that an iPhone can produce art as meaningful as a Leica, and that the value of an image lies in what it communicates rather than in how it was captured. The labels with their photographic imagery stand in deliberate contrast to the more conventional, text-heavy wine packaging, and they signal to consumers that this is a wine made by a person with an aesthetic sensibility, a creative impulse, and a desire to share his way of seeing with the world.

The global vision that Tanabe has developed for Aperture Farm is ambitious and distinctive: rather than focusing on European grape varieties and trying to compete in the international market on terms defined by France, Italy, or California, he aims to share Japanese Kyoho wines with the world. This is not merely a commercial strategy but a cultural mission — a belief that Kyoho, and by extension Japanese indigenous varieties, have a legitimate place in the global conversation about fine wine, and that the international market is ready to appreciate wines that are distinctive, authentic, and place-specific rather than imitative and standardised. The 2023 tasting in Burgundy was a validation of this vision: European tasters, exposed to the most sophisticated wine culture in the world, responded positively to Tanabe's Kyoho, praising its finesse and accepting its foxy character as a feature rather than a flaw. "People didn't mind the so-called foxy character and said the wine had finesse," Tanabe recalls. "That's when I felt Kyoho could compete internationally." The export programme — currently reaching 8 countries — is the practical expression of this confidence, and the continued expansion of Kyoho plantings at Aperture Farm is the agricultural commitment that underpins it.

The future of Aperture Farm & Winery is tied to the maturation of Tanabe's vision — the deepening of his understanding of Tomi's terroir, the expansion of his Kyoho programme, the development of his Chenin Blanc plantings, and the continued evolution of his winemaking techniques. The 1.7 hectares will grow, the variety portfolio will diversify, and the export network will expand — but the core principles will remain: organic viticulture, wild yeast fermentation, minimal sulphites, and the honest, straightforward approach to wine that has defined the estate from its founding. The winery building, with its gravity-flow design, its low ceilings, its forklift-accessible layout, and its combination of workspace and home, will continue to shape the character of the wines that emerge from it — wines that are intimate, personal, and made by a single person with a clear vision and an unwavering commitment to his grapes. And the name "Aperture" will continue to resonate — a reminder that wine, like photography, is about focus, about framing, about opening oneself to the light, and about sharing what one sees with others.

In an age of industrial wine production, of homogenised flavours and marketing-driven branding, Aperture Farm & Winery stands as a radical alternative — not because it rejects modernity but because it has chosen a different modernity, one that values the photographer's eye over the marketer's spreadsheet, the vigneron's hand over the chemist's formula, and the indigenous grape over the international clone. Ryo Tanabe is not merely making wine; he is making a case — that a former photographer can become a vigneron, that an abandoned table grape variety can become a fine wine, that a small winery in Nagano can compete on the world stage, and that the honest, straightforward, minimally interventionist approach to wine can produce something that is both authentic and beautiful. The 2011 vineyard planting, the 2022 winery opening, the Kyoho revolution, the Burgundy tasting, the 8-country export programme, and the iPhone photographs on the labels: all united in one bottle, one estate, one unanswerable argument for the possibility of creative, place-specific, individually crafted wine in the Chikumagawa Wine Valley.