Until the adoption of administrative measures for creating a wine industry promotion special zone, except for farmhouses the ownership of cultivated land for commercial purposes was not permitted.
It was administratively impossible for wine producers to own cultivated land for growing grapes.
Grape growers mainly focused on cultivating table grapes for fresh consumption, and it was only as a way of avoiding the risk of having surplus grapes during bumper harvests that the idea of using grapes for wine production was considered.
Early on in Japan, the agricultural base was fixed for only providing table grapes for fresh consumption. The structure of the wine production industry which developed later was done around that established grape growing agricultural base.
The structure of the wine production industry inevitably developed amid the historical background of the development of Japan's grape growing industry, and the source of that inevitability lay in the fact despite having a 1,280-year history of grape cultivation, Japanese people could not come into contact with the culture of wine until the relatively late Edo period of 1603 to 1867.