The Restaurateur & the Closed School

The story of Fattoria al Fiore begins in Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, where Hirotaka Meguro opened AL FIORE — an Italian restaurant — in 2005. The name "Al Fiore" means "a flower" in Italian, and it reflected Meguro's vision of creating a place where food, wine, and hospitality could bloom together. For six years, AL FIORE served the people of Sendai: families celebrating birthdays, couples on first dates, office workers seeking refuge from the city's relentless pace, and wine lovers discovering the pleasures of Italian cuisine paired with wines from across Europe. Meguro was not merely a restaurateur; he was a host, a curator, a man who understood that the best meals are not just about what is on the plate but about the atmosphere, the company, the sense of occasion that transforms eating into dining. The restaurant was successful, beloved, and deeply rooted in the community — a fixture of Sendai's culinary landscape.

Then, on 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. The magnitude 9.0 tremor — the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful in the world since modern record-keeping began — devastated the Tohoku region. Sendai, located just 130 kilometres from the epicentre, suffered catastrophic damage: buildings collapsed, infrastructure failed, and the subsequent tsunami claimed thousands of lives across the coastal prefectures of Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi added a layer of existential dread to the physical destruction, as radiation fears spread across the region and the nation watched in horror as one of Japan's most agriculturally productive areas was rendered uninhabitable, uncultivable, and seemingly unrecoverable. For Meguro, the earthquake was not merely a natural disaster; it was a rupture in the fabric of his life, his business, and his understanding of what was possible.

The immediate aftermath was chaos. AL FIORE survived the earthquake itself, but the city was paralysed, the supply chains broken, the customers dispersed or grieving or simply trying to survive. The restaurant industry in Tohoku collapsed overnight — not because people no longer wanted to eat, but because the infrastructure that made dining out possible had been destroyed. Ingredients could not be sourced, staff could not travel, and the psychological trauma of the disaster made the pleasures of gastronomy seem frivolous, even offensive, in the face of such suffering. Meguro faced a choice: to rebuild the restaurant as it had been, to wait for the city to recover and hope that his customers would return, or to use this moment of rupture as an opportunity to reimagine everything — his relationship to food, to wine, to the land, to the community that had been shattered and would need to be rebuilt not as it was but as something new.

He chose reimagination. In the months after the earthquake, as the full scale of the destruction became clear and the slow, grinding work of recovery began, Meguro started to think about wine in a different way. He had always loved wine — Italian wine, primarily, the familiar names and reliable labels that he served at AL FIORE — but he had never thought about where it came from, how it was made, or what it meant to create something from the land rather than merely to consume what others had created. The earthquake had exposed the fragility of the supply chains that modern life depends upon: the trucks that bring food from farm to city, the ships that carry wine from Europe to Japan, the electrical grids that power the refrigeration that keeps everything fresh. Meguro began to wonder whether there was a different way — a way to create wine not as a commercial product imported from abroad but as a local expression, made from grapes grown in Tohoku soil, fermented with the wild yeasts that live on Tohoku vines, and shared with the Tohoku community that was struggling to rebuild. The idea was not yet a plan; it was a seed, planted in the rubble, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.

At Fattoria al Fiore, the winemaking philosophy is expressed not merely in what is done but in what is refused — the technologies, interventions, and shortcuts that characterise conventional winemaking are systematically rejected in favour of methods that are slower, more laborious, more physically demanding, and ultimately more expressive of the grapes and the place from which they come. The most striking example of this refusal is the commitment to gravity flow: the entire winery, housed in a converted elementary school gymnasium, has been designed so that wine moves from crush to fermentation to ageing to bottling entirely by gravity, without the use of pumps. This is not merely an aesthetic choice or a romantic affectation; it is a technical decision with profound implications for the quality and character of the wine. Pumps, even the gentlest peristaltic or diaphragm pumps, subject wine to shear forces, oxidation, and physical stress that can strip flavour compounds, damage delicate phenolics, and introduce flavours that are not native to the grape. Gravity flow, by contrast, is the gentlest possible form of movement — the wine flows slowly, quietly, without agitation, preserving the integrity of its molecular structure and allowing it to develop with minimal disturbance.

The gravity-flow system at Fattoria al Fiore is a feat of architectural and engineering ingenuity, made possible by Reina's background in architecture and her leadership in the winery's design and construction. The closed elementary school gymnasium — a cavernous, high-ceilinged space that had once echoed with the sounds of children playing basketball and volleyball — was transformed into a multi-level winemaking facility where each stage of production occupies a different elevation. Grapes are received at the highest level, destemmed and crushed by hand or with minimal mechanical assistance, and the must flows by gravity into fermentation tanks on the level below. After fermentation, the wine flows again by gravity into ageing vessels — a combination of old barrels, stainless steel tanks, and neutral containers — on a lower level still. And finally, after ageing, the wine flows to the bottling line at the lowest level, where it is bottled, capped, and labelled without ever having been pumped, pushed, or subjected to mechanical force. The system requires more space, more vertical construction, and more manual labour than a conventional pumped winery, but the result is wine that is quieter, more composed, more transparent in its expression of terroir.

The commitment to zero sulfites is equally radical and equally consequential. Sulfur dioxide is the single most common additive in winemaking, used since antiquity to prevent oxidation, inhibit microbial spoilage, and stabilise wine for transport and ageing. Even most "natural" wines contain some added sulfur — typically 20-40 ppm, sometimes less, rarely none. To produce wine with absolutely no added sulfites requires immaculate grape health, pristine cellar hygiene, meticulous temperature control, and a willingness to accept the risks that come with allowing wine to develop without chemical preservatives. At Fattoria al Fiore, the zero-sulfite commitment is supported by the gravity-flow system — the gentle handling reduces oxidation risk — and by the fastidious cleanliness of the cellar, where every tank, every barrel, every hose, and every surface is cleaned and sanitised with a thoroughness that would satisfy a surgeon. The wines that emerge from this process are profoundly alive — wines that continue to evolve in the bottle, that express vintage variation with transparency, and that carry the full microbiome of their origin in every glass.

But the handmade philosophy at Fattoria al Fiore extends far beyond the cellar and into every aspect of the wine's presentation. The labels are handmade from washi — traditional Japanese paper crafted from natural fibres such as kozo (mulberry), mitsumata, or gampi. Washi is not merely a decorative choice; it is a functional one — the paper's natural absorbency and breathability allow the bottle to "breathe" in a way that conventional wine labels do not, and the irregular texture and subtle variations of handmade paper reflect the philosophy of the wine itself: not standardised, not mass-produced, but individual, alive, and expressive of the hands that made it. The labels are affixed to the bottles not with synthetic adhesive but with rice glue — a traditional Japanese paste made from rice starch and water, biodegradable, non-toxic, and completely removable without chemical solvents. And the bottles are sealed not with conventional foil capsules or synthetic corks but with beeswax — melted, dipped, and finished by hand, each seal slightly different, each one a small work of craft that protects the cork and the wine beneath while declaring the handmade nature of everything the bottle contains.

The winemaking itself follows the same principles of minimal intervention and maximum expression. Fermentation is carried out exclusively with wild yeasts — the indigenous populations that live on grape skins, in the vineyard air, and on the surfaces of the cellar — with no selected, laboratory-cultured strains introduced. The fermentation is monitored daily, tasted constantly, and allowed to proceed at its own pace, with temperature managed through ambient conditions rather than mechanical refrigeration. The wines are bottled unfiltered and unfined, preserving the full vitality and raw expression of the grapes, and the only "additive" is time — the patience to allow the wine to settle, to clarify naturally, to develop the complexity that comes from slow, unforced evolution. The result is wines that are unmistakably natural: sometimes cloudy, sometimes with sediment, always evolving, always alive, and always — in their best expressions — profoundly expressive of the Zao Mountain terroir, the Tohoku climate, and the hands that guided them from grape to glass.

To understand Fattoria al Fiore, one must understand the concept of "handmade" — not as a marketing category or a nostalgic affectation, but as a comprehensive philosophy that governs every aspect of the winery's production, from the vineyard to the bottle to the label to the seal. Hirotaka Meguro and Reina did not choose handmade methods because they are charming or rustic or photogenic; they chose them because they believe, based on years of experience in the restaurant industry and the winery, that the hand preserves what the machine destroys. A machine can crush grapes faster, pump wine more efficiently, print labels more cheaply, and seal bottles more consistently than any human hand. But a machine cannot feel the resistance of a grape skin and adjust pressure accordingly; cannot taste a fermenting must and decide whether to punch down or wait; cannot hold a brush and apply rice glue with the precision that ensures the label will adhere without wrinkling; cannot dip a bottle into molten beeswax and withdraw it at the exact moment that produces the perfect thickness and texture. The hand is slower, less consistent, more labour-intensive, and more expensive. But it is also more attentive, more responsive, more individual, and more connected to the material it works with.

The handmade philosophy is therefore not a rejection of modernity but a different kind of modernity — one that values connection over efficiency, individuality over standardisation, and the particular over the universal. In an age of industrial wine production, where the same yeast strains, the same enzymes, the same tannins, and the same flavourings produce wines that taste increasingly similar regardless of where they are made, Fattoria al Fiore's commitment to handmade everything is a radical assertion of difference. Each bottle is slightly different from the next: the washi label has a slightly different texture, the rice glue is applied with slightly different thickness, the beeswax seal has a slightly different shape and sheen. These variations are not flaws; they are signatures — evidence that a human being, not a machine, made this bottle, and that the wine inside is as individual as the hand that guided it.

The post-disaster context of Fattoria al Fiore is equally essential to its identity. The winery was born from the 2011 earthquake not merely as a business opportunity but as a form of recovery — personal, communal, and regional. Meguro's decision to leave the restaurant industry and become a vigneron was not an escape from the disaster but a response to it: a recognition that the old ways of doing things — the imported ingredients, the global supply chains, the urban dependence on rural production that the earthquake had exposed as fragile — needed to be replaced with something more local, more resilient, more rooted in the specific place and community that had been devastated. The vineyard, planted on abandoned farmland, is a form of agricultural renewal; the winery, housed in a closed school, is a form of community preservation; and the wine, made with zero sulfites and gravity flow and handmade everything, is a form of cultural resistance — a declaration that Tohoku can produce not merely rice and cherries but wine, not merely commodities but art, not merely survival but flourishing.

Reina's role in this enterprise is as essential as Meguro's, though less visible in the public narrative. Her background in architecture provided the technical vision for the gravity-flow winery, transforming a closed elementary school gymnasium into a multi-level production facility that is both functional and beautiful — a space that honours its past while serving its present purpose. Her influence extends beyond the physical plant into the aesthetic philosophy of the winery: the washi labels, the rice glue, the beeswax seals, and the overall presentation of Fattoria al Fiore wines reflect a sensibility that is at once traditional and contemporary, Japanese and international, rustic and refined. The partnership between Meguro and Reina is not merely romantic; it is professional, creative, and complementary — two people with different skills and perspectives united by a shared commitment to making wine that is as honest, as handmade, and as rooted in place as possible.

The future of Fattoria al Fiore is tied to the maturation of the vineyard, the deepening of Meguro and Reina's understanding of Tohoku terroir, and the gradual building of a reputation that extends beyond Japan's natural wine community to international markets where the story of post-disaster recovery, handmade craftsmanship, and zero-sulfite purity resonates with consumers seeking authenticity and meaning in what they drink. The 2.3 hectares will expand as more abandoned farmland is reclaimed, more varieties are planted, and more growers are brought into the Fattoria al Fiore network. The gravity-flow system will be refined, the handmade processes will be perfected, and the wines will continue to evolve — each vintage a new expression of the Zao Mountains, the Tohoku climate, and the hands that guide the grapes from vine to bottle. And the closed school gymnasium, once silent and abandoned, will continue to echo with the sounds of fermentation, of bottling, of craft — a space of renewal, of hope, of the stubborn refusal to surrender that defines the best of post-disaster recovery and the best of natural winemaking alike.