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EAT THE WOR LD
poetry. Yasuhiro Ooyama, the bearded
proprietor who’s known as the “wine pro-
fessor,” poured me a cloudy pink brew that
smelled like watermelon candy and wet
poodle fur. He said it was bottled with-
out added sulfur dioxide in a friend’s wine
shop in Kyushu. I nursed it for a while and
tried not to move. My sojourn through the
art-house film that is the Tokyo wine scene
was just beginning.
One of the delightful things about theT
his past November, in Tokyo, I stood pressed
against a bar with five grown men, in a barely lit
space the size of a walk-in closet. When some-
one moved, the rest of us shifted like a single
organism. Winestand Waltz, a “standing bar”
in Ebisu, was a testament to the Japanese pen-
chant for making the most of small spaces. It
was hidden so expertly from passersby that my taxi driver had to
interview a cook at the adjacent café before he found it.
After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed the Jacques Tati
posters, Le Creuset casseroles, and slim volumes of SymbolistDISPATCHDrinking Wine in Tokyo
Alex Halberstadt on Japan’s natural wine
scene, standing-room-only bars,
and the new wave of domestic poursILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN