What Shintoism Taught Me About Japanese Wine

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I walk into Galerie K Paris. Before I’ve said a word, someone’s already kneeling down to swap my shoes for a pair of slippers. Kei Miyagawa, who runs the place, is dressed up too, for a Monday afternoon appointment with one visitor and her notebook.

It’s only once we started talking about wine that the ritual made sense to me. That care in how I was welcomed wasn’t separate from what Kei explained afterward. It was the same instinct, playing out before either of us had said a word about wine.

At Galerie K, Master Sake Sommelier and Kura Master founder Kei Miyagawa traces Japanese wine back to Shinto. This is why Koshu is meant to be drunk the moment it arrives, not aged. French cuisine’s shift over the last 36 years, less salt and sugar, more acidity and umami, has landed it on exactly the terrain Japanese wine was always built for, which is why Kei calls this the moment for it in France. Galerie K itself sells online only.

A country that sees gods in big things

Here’s where that instinct comes from: Shinto, Japan’s traditional religion. It’s built on reverence for the big stuff in nature, mountains, waterfalls, a tree that’s clearly seen a few centuries.

Stand in front of something genuinely imposing and feel that little jolt of awe? In this tradition, that jolt means a kamisama, a deity, broadly speaking, is right there with you. And if anything, in theory, can house a kamisama, then everything is worth handling with care. Including, it turns out, the welcome you give a visitor on a random Monday afternoon.

Kei’s clearest example is cherry blossoms, sakura. The word splits into sa, kamisama, the deity itself, and ku, to come down, to arrive. Put the two together and you get the mountain god descending to settle for a while in the cherry blossoms. Then he moves on to the rice fields to watch over the new harvest, exactly what old belief says happens every spring.

So the blossoms were never just a pretty show: they were the signal, the green light for planting the rice. I haven’t looked at a cherry tree the same way since.

Koshu, or the art of drinking right now

That same idea, receive what’s in front of you, don’t try to hold on to it, comes back a few minutes later.

Kei pours me two wines from Chanter estate: a 2024 Koshu and a 2022 Muscat Bailey A. Koshu sits close to a pinot gris in structure, subtle, almost shy, a lot like Japanese cuisine itself.

Kei walks me through the word: the character shu means what’s just arrived, what’s right here, right now. In Japanese culture, that’s basically an instruction: drink it now, don’t wait.

It’s the same reflex Kei described with the cherry trees, just applied to a glass instead of a mountain.

That idea of now runs through the whole way Japan eats: the season, right away, no delay. France does almost the opposite. Things age, sauces build slowly, time does the heavy lifting, think of a beef bourguignon, hours of simmering before it’s anywhere near ready.

Two completely different philosophies of time, both sitting on the same table. It’s a big part of why Koshu surprises people first with how light it is. It was never built to wait. It was built to be drunk today.

Why French cuisine is catching up with Japan

Which brings us to what might be the best part of the whole conversation.

Kei describes how, in one generation, French gastronomy quietly changed direction: less salt, less sugar in desserts, less fat in sauces. And in the same breath, more acidity and more umami, that deep savory note you’d normally chase in a good broth or a well-aged parmesan.

Thirty-six years ago, salad as we know it today barely existed on a classic French table. At best, you’d get a leaf of lettuce next to the cheese course, not a dish of its own. Crunchy raw vegetables? Also a fairly recent habit. Before that, everything got slow-simmered into submission.

That shift matters more than it sounds, especially after everything Kei just told me about Koshu. A cuisine leaning more acidic, more umami than salty, less sweet, less fatty, is exactly the terrain Japanese wine has always been built for. Kei put it simply: this is the moment for Japanese wine. The French table has drifted, without really planning to, into speaking the same language.

Who’s telling me all this

At this point I wanted to know how one person ends up knowing this much, so here’s a bit of Kei’s own story.

The beginning

Keiichiro Miyagawa, born in 1962. He arrived in France in 1990 and joined Restaurant Suntory Paris on the Champs-Élysées, becoming its director by 1993. In 2006, he helped launch French restaurants in Japan’s Wakayama prefecture as general manager of the Hôtel de Yoshino.

Back in France, he took over alcohol sales, sake especially, at Workshop Issé, a Japanese gourmet shop, in 2007. There he helped bring premium Ginjo sake to the whole country.

Galerie K Paris was born

Then, in 2010 (well, on 24/12/2009 to be exact), he founded Galerie K Paris: wholesale Japanese alcohol, wine trading, consulting for restaurants.

He’s been a member of the Paris Île-de-France Sommelier Association since 1990. He also holds the title of Master Sake Sommelier, Kikisake-shi, awarded by the Sake Service Institute (SSI), whose international branch he now runs.

In 2016, he founded the Kura Master association, whose first competition ran the following year alongside Xavier Thuizat.

In 2019, he opened the École des Maîtres du Saké in Paris. And the titles kept stacking up after that: Sake Samurai in 2020, an honorary distinction on the recommendation of the JSS (Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association), then Master Sommelier of the UDSF (Union de la Sommellerie Française) in 2023.

Xavier Thuizat, name-checked above for founding Kura Master, isn’t just a random co-signer. He’s since become France’s Best Sommelier in 2022, then Meilleur Ouvrier de France in 2023 — two of the toughest titles in French sommellerie. Having one of the country’s most decorated sommeliers chair the competition’s jury says more than any statistic about how sake, and Japanese wine along with it, has earned a serious seat at the table of French sommellerie.

Today, Galerie K Paris sells exclusively online, B2B and B2C, and sees visitors by appointment in its Paris office rather than a shop you can just wander into.

Walk-in customers are still rarer for Japanese wine than for sake, probably because the flavors are subtler than people expect, and France is a market that’s still wary of the unfamiliar, harder to sell into than, say, the UK. One number Kei shared to give a sense of scale: by his count, around 31% of a panel of 541 Paris restaurants carry Japanese sake, along with roughly 20% of 3- and 4-star hotels. (That figure comes from him, and I wasn’t able to verify it independently, so take it as his read on the market rather than a hard fact.)

Back to what was in the glass

None of that career history matters much if the wine itself doesn’t hold up, so here’s what I actually tasted.

The Muscat Bailey A had seen oak: smokier than the grape’s usual fruit-forward style, with notes that land somewhere near peach melba, and real length on the finish.

Structurally, it’s somewhere between pinot noir and gamay, happiest served alongside a Burgundy rather than in competition with one.

Kei also pointed me toward Diamant estate, and Yoshio Amemiya, the winemaker whose range Galerie K Paris distributes online.

Amemiya-san’s background makes Kei’s Burgundy comparison almost literal: this third-generation winemaker trained at the CFPPA in Beaune, then under Simon Bize, a benchmark name in the Côte de Beaune. A double lineage, Japanese by family estate, Burgundian by training, that probably explains the silky style running through his wines.

His pairing advice: umami-forward soup, raw or lightly cooked fish, a crunchy vegetable salad, exactly the register French cuisine has been drifting toward.

One address, two worlds

A welcome ritual, a word’s etymology, a Shinto belief, a shift in French cooking habits.

Walking out of Galerie K Paris, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were all telling me the same thing: a country that puts extreme care into every detail, and a France starting to speak that same language at the table.

Maybe Japanese wine doesn’t need as much cultural translation as we think. It’s just showing up right on time.

Galerie K Paris is part of our selection of verified addresses in Where to Find Japanese Wine in France.