Grape Picking in Shiwa, Iwate

I’m quite fond of fruit picking; it’s such a fun and relaxing activity (plus you can eat some of the fruit too). I’d said to the boyfriend that I wanted to do fruit picking while in Japan, and I was expecting to go apple picking. But instead, we went out one day, checked out a small winery (omnomnom wine~), then went grape picking!

We went to a vineyard in Shiwa, where they had four typed of grapes; one white and three reds. (Please forgive me, I forgot the names of them…<_<) We were given a basket and a pair of scissors each, then we were told that we could eat about 500 grams worth of grapes during our picking session (whether we ate only 500g is the real question!).

Seating area to rest and munch on grapes

 

 

It was around mid-afternoon, the sun was looking to set soon, and we discovered that the white grapes had all been picked! Bit of a downer when we found that out, but oh well, we enjoyed picking red grapes and nomming on them anyway. One variety was quite sweet, another pretty sour, but all were delicious. One of the staff pickers even popped over and gave us another bunch to eat there, because apparently it had grown perfectly, hah.

 

 

About 5-10 minutes in, we were seated at a small plastic table, munching on grapes, and one of the staff members came over to us, apologized for there not being any white grapes left on the vines, then gave us two bags with all the available varieties of grapes, complimentary. Talk about lucky!

That's probably about a kilo of free grapes...score!

After eating and picking a few bunches of grapes (which were priced at about 400-500 yen per half a kilo, if I remember correctly), we went to pay for our load. The staff must’ve been feeling super generous that day. We’d picked about 1.4kg of grapes, and she gave them to us for 200 yen. Excuuuuuse me? I honestly thought she was mistaken, but nope, 200 yen and we went home with about $15 worth of fruit for about $3. Hellayeah!

Took the pandas along for a day out.

So overall, it was a pretty chill afternoon, and I was super happy to get loads of fruit without paying much for it (yesh, I’m the scabby kind). The drive there was rather nice too~

There are a few wineries and vineyards around Iwate, so if you’re travelling around Northern Japan and like your wines, I’d recommend searching some up and paying them a visit. I always find it fun to compare wines in Japan to Australian wine (not that I’m a connoisseur or anything). Maybe I’ll do a wine-related post at a later date, since I’m not a heavy drinker and it’ll probably take forever to gather up some good info to share, lawl.

Aaaand that brings me to the end of this post! Hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to post a comment, even if it’s completely unrelated to this post, because I’d love to hear from you :)

Bye for now~