Note 1: Jules Lebegue Bordeaux Médoc 2022
[Back in the day, I co-authored a blog called Full Pour along with one of my closest friends Julian Coldrey. He was also part of the Japan 2016 crew; when we were on Naoshima together, for example, we enjoyed some Cayuse wines along with a very fancy French meal at our hotel there. Because I don’t feel like writing yet another travel entry today, here’s a tasting note!]
In Japan, convenience stores, known as konbini here, are ubiquitous. They’re also not much like their North American equivalents. There are three main chains here: Lawson, which got its start in Ohio, FamilyMart, home of Netflix branded underwear and Imabari towels in their brand’s colors, and 7-Eleven, which got its start 98 years ago in Dallas, Texas. These days, though, 7-Eleven is a Japanese company, I believe. Most American tourists here know them as “the ones with the ATMs that work”. Me, I know them as the least interesting of the three. Anthony Bourdain used to rave about the Lawson egg salad sandwich - and he’s absolutely right about that. It’s perfection. And I’m a huge fan of the FamilyMart line of Afternoon Tea products, especially the cold Earl Grey and the frozen Earl Grey smoothies. But 7-Eleven is always there when you need it; it carries essentially the same stuff, minus the quirky clothing options of the other two. The cold rooibos tea is fine, the pancakes with margarine and maple are fine, and so on. No surprises.
What did surprise me, though, was a bottle of 7-Eleven branded wine - actually Seven & i Premium Gold - that said YOSEMITE ROAD on the front of it. Huh. Okay, so they’ve got their own house brand wines. Makes sense, right? But wait: they also have a Médoc? Grand Vin de Bordeaux, environmentally friendly, for less than ten bucks? OK, I’m sold.
The packaging is classy: it’s a Japanese style bottle, but bigger than usual at 750 mL, not 720 mL. The screwcap is flimsy, but again very much in line with Japanese screwcaps; not substantial and Very Serious like, say, UK supermarket wine. The capsule is plastic, scored for easy removal. The overall effect is of luxury on a budget; it looks Serious and French, but also kind of like something you’d sneak into your cabin at summer camp.
I’m currently shacked up at the JR Hotel Clement Tokushima, a fancy hotel integrated into the train station here. It’s got a 1980s vibe for sure; it’s seen better days, but it’s as faded as Falcon Crest shoulder pads are wide. It is, as they say, the best option in town, the town here being a prefectural capital of one of the poorer parts of Japan and not particularly interesting - but it is the closest major city to Ryozen-ji, temple #1 of the Shikoku 88 temple pilgrimage. I first arrived here on April 10, 2025; that was exactly eight weeks ago. Today’s test of my Google Translate skills was a fun one: can I get a pizza delivered from Pizza Royalhat? Answer: yes. The “Legend of the Ascetic (R) Beef Kalbi Grilled Meat Pizza” was delivered right on time and it’s now sitting here next to mah wine.
There aren’t any wine glasses in the room, but there is a glass coffee cup, so I’ve used that. Color-wise, we’re talking goth drag queen nail polish with sunstruck Diet RC Cola: kind of dark, gloomy, but rich; it feels like there should be a chirpy marketer here saying “don’t forget, we call them dried plums now!”. In short, it looks appetizing; it might be very slightly watery at the rim, but honestly, who cares? The alcohol is on point at 14% and I honestly hate reviewers who care more about the looks then the taste.
On the nose, what you get is French, full stop: it’s got that certain Not A New World Wine smell and it’s delightful. There’s some fresh fruit going on here; it doesn’t smell oxidized or dead or anything at all bad - it just smells like good red wine. There’s some slight oakiness here, or maybe just terroir - it’s hard to tell; it does not smell like Californian wine at twice the price (with double the residual sugar), thankfully. There’s also a bit of sharpness with some swirling (but carefully, this coffee cup wasn’t designed for that!) that brings to mind the rind of an aged cheese: something umami and earthy. Good.
The best thing about finally taking a taste of this is getting that horrible pizza taste out of my mouth. It’s nicely tannic, but reasonably so as well; it isn’t smooth and slippery, but also won’t pull a Captain Crunch on the roof your mouth on the way down. It’s almost got a kind of burnt sugar / dates sort of feeling, but it is not sweet; it’s more like ketjap manis or a similar condiment, full and rich and mouth-coating with that peculiar savory edge to it that strikes me as common across French and Japanese food; both cuisines place a lot of value on umami notes. In short, I bet this would be absolutely phenomenal with tapas - but all I have is Pizza Royalhat pizza, which is about as dumb as the name suggests.
Believe me, if there were some way to buy a wine like this back home for ten bucks, I absolutely would. It does remind me vaguely of high end Sonoma cabernet blends in that it manages to both have some New World fruit richness as well as some nicely charred barrel notes, but without punishing alcohol or insouciant tannins. It’s just an all-round good wine. Plus, true confession time, this is the 2nd bottle of it I’ve bought; I consumed the first bottle over three nights in Takamatsu earlier this week, and it didn’t give up the ghost taste-wise even when left unrefrigerated in my hotel room.
Now, because you’ve somehow read this far, I suppose I should go ahead and slip in today’s pilgrimage notes, because why not. Although the walking part stopped yesterday, there are two (or three) final things left to do: complete the circle by returning to where I started (Ryozen-ji, T1, outside of Tokushima) and then report a successful journey to Kobo Daishi, who’s said to be meditating eternally on Mount Koya, over on Honshu, a ways from Osaka. (Spoiler alert: he’s actually dead, but in keeping with tradition, you don’t say that.) The idea is that you receive a different stamp in your stamp book showing you’ve completed the pilgrimage, and then one more at Okuno-in, Kukai’s mausoleum on Koyasan. (And, for good measure, I might venture to Kyoto, where Kukai was head priest at a temple, to get one more stamp from there as well.)
As per usual, I was up at the crack of dawn, but in no hurry to get out of bed, so I didn’t go take a bath or anything before breakfast. Instead, I just stood in a massive line that had formed at 06h30 and waited for my tray of J food, which was good, not great. I had bought a carton of milk at 7-Eleven yesterday to have with my coffee and was happy to have it again today; I strongly prefer tea to coffee, but I’ve been drinking mostly coffee while here because I really don’t like green tea. Barley tea, roasted tea, matcha, black tea, rooibos even, all of that is fine, just not plain green tea, yecch.
Anyhow: my bus was going to leave at 10h30, so I headed out to Ritsurin Garden, arriving there around 07h15 - and whoa, it was already feeling decidedly warm outside. Summery for sure, even. Almost no clouds in the sky, oppressive humidity clearly on its way for another punishing Japanese summer, and not even the slightest breeze. Hmm. I would’ve have expected that so early in the day, but there I was. I power-walked through as much as I cared to; it’s a magnificent garden in the high classic, very sterile Japanese style, that had all of the precision and none of the passion that goes with that territory. I appreciated it, but just. There was a bus leaving for the station (and my hotel) shortly, so hey, back on the bus to get back to the hotel, which would’ve been a quick trip if a huge gaggle of American college students hadn’t flagged down the bus after it had left a stop to board it en masse, which took forever and made no sense as there was a train station a block away from the bus stop where they boarded, sigh.
Back in my room, I realized that I had now accumulated so many bits and bobs over the last week that my pack is now not only completely full, but also heavy. Whoops. But that’s fine; I only need to schlep it around a little bit here and there. Somehow, I organized everything, packed it all away, and then changed my bus ticket to an earlier bus; there were no problems finding it, and I settled into my reserved seat, watching an enormous Chinese man settle into his on the other side, draping a paper napkin over his fold-away table before opening two enormous beers and some rice balls to steel himself for the epic 80-minute journey ahead.
Oddly, there’s a bus stop at a parking area on the expressway that goes from Shikoku to Honshu that’s only a kilometer away from T1; that’s where I alit along with two Danish women who were headed there as well to begin a few days’ walk. I wished them well, then scarpered off to a German prisoner of war camp from World War I - interesting, strange to see signs in German for a change - and then a bit further along, I recognized Ryozen-ji, T1, from across the river. It’s a funny feeling, coming back to a place eight weeks later and thinking oh, right, I remember seeing this for the very first time and, well, here I am again. So what’s changed? My body’s changed a very slight bit, I’m now handier with temple rituals, and the weather’s a lot warmer (and it’s not raining this time!)… but otherwise, yup, it’s a-me, Chris Pratt. No changes there. At the henro museum yesterday, I heard two American guys talking about how this was “the hardest thing they’d ever done” (they’d ridden their bikes to all 88 temples, go them!) and a European woman beaming that she’d just had a life-changing experience, but me? Yeah, still me.
Anyhow, the first of today’s side quests was upon me: I had a look at the main hall and the Daishi hall at the temple, but didn’t light incense, just threw coins into the offering boxes, wisely biting my tongue at two European tourists holding hands and making goo-goo eyes at each other while wearing wildly inappropriate clothing for a temple. Not my problem! At the temple stamp office, it was the same old dude from eight weeks ago, who almost stamped my book in the wrong place but who happily saw my expression, said “oh, finished?” in English, then did the needful and said “congratulations!”. Then, I remembered that it should be possible to buy a certificate from the temple as well showing that I’d completed the pilgrimage, so I managed to do that as well, filling out a form in Japanese and writing my own name in katakana somehow, using Google Translate to tell the monk that I wasn’t sure if that was correct - he then sounded it out, it sounded like my name, so yay, problem solved. Certificate #2 was now in the bag.
Now what? In the back of my mind I’d always wanted to make a visit all the way out to a temple where I’d seen a rosary that I’d liked, but I convinced myself that that was silly; time is limited, money is finite, and that moment had passed. Plus, how many times would I ever use that thing? Probably never. So, to kill a bit of time before check-in at my hotel, I decided to go to Montbell Tokushima, the only Montbell on the island I hadn’t been to yet. That was annoying: it was a 1.5 kilometer walk in 85 degree heat with no shade - and when I got there, they did have indeed have a moderately cool T-shirt that no other store had, but not in size XL. Boo.
So no T-shirt for me, waah. But there was a Sushiro across the street, so I popped in for a quick $6 lunch of utterly unremarkable conveyor belt sushi. I was going to reward myself with a FamilyMart Earl Grey smoothie, but damn it, they were sold out, so there wasn’t much left to do but wait for the bus to Tokushima station. I got off one stop early so that I could stop by the Tokushima Welcome Center and get one more completion certificate - when I walked in Lance, the Hawaiian bear working there, said “Chris!” and happily issued me one. (It helps to have a memorable name and beard.) Afterwards, I checked into my hotel room and changed out of my sweaty clothes.
After a brief rest and device recharge session, I figured that it was time to do the one thing I couldn’t do the last two times I was here due to rain: take the ropeway up to the top of Mt. Bizan and enjoy the view, so I did. Along the way, I enjoyed a delightful conversation with two American women who’d checked into the hotel before me; they were currently on a trip around Japan together to visit culturally important sites, so were here to see a traditional dance performance like I’d done back in April. Surprisingly, it turns out that they were also fans of The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, so we bonded over that. Go figure!
The ropeway was fun, the views were superb; it’s something to circle back around and see mountains and think, yeah, I walked there. And also there. And up and over those ones. Wild. But enough tourism for one day; back down the mountain, back to the hotel, and hello 7-Eleven and Pizza Royalcrap. All good.
Thank you for reading. This dadbear is signing off for now.
