cépages – Gunma, Japan

Not quite sure how I originally found this place (can't find mention of it on this subreddit, and got the impression we were some of the first tourists to visit), but had it marked on my Google maps and it was pretty straight forward to book, while being highly rated on tabelog (>4, with only 24 reviews), so decided to dine here during my Japan trip over Christmas.

The restaurant is about a 1.5 hour journey from Tokyo. The chef and restaurant manager (the only two people working in the restaurant that sat 5 diners) previously worked together at L'Effervescence and the chef is particularly inspired by CHIUnE. I've never been to the latter, but he mentioned asking the architect to design a similar restaurant space for cépages. Worth noting the chef speaks limited English but I don't think the barrier would be too bad for a non-Japanese speaker. We dined with local friend who was able to translate anything that the staff had trouble conveying.

The food was very good, although I wasn't a fan of the overuse of (pretty average) black truffle at times, but that's a personal preference. A couple of highlights were the prosciutto toast (pic 1) and the unagi dish (pic 3) which had very crispy skin. The most memorable part of the meal, however, was the wine pairing. Most bottles in the pairing were around 10-20k yen bottles, with 2021 Nana-Tsu-Mori and a 1998 Chateau Haut-Brion for mains being a lot more expensive and obvious highlights. It did feel like wine was a real focus of this restaurant, hence its name, and I imagine they can't be making much profit on the pairing given the price. Food and wine pairing were both around 35k yen each (so roughly 70k yen pp).