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This article focuses on recent initiatives to promote wine tourism in the Kōfu Basin in Yamanashi Prefecture in order to analyse the ongoing process of regional revitalization in Japan. Based on long-term field research in the area, the article argues that wine tourism is a contested field, in which national and prefectural policy initiatives clash with the local history of grape and wine production, as well as pre-existing and emerging local initiatives to link wine production and tourism. Moreover, the article shows that both grape production and the local wine industry are patterned alongside a complicated patchwork of socio-spatial boundaries within and across municipal and cooperative boundaries in the Kōfu Basin, thus complicating both private and public efforts to promote wine tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]