A circle of friends connected by gootouchi! The “FIST BUMP” corner of the radio program “GRAND MARQUEE” features people who live and enjoy Tokyo in a relay format.
On September 20, Shinichi Takahashi and Mikachuu of the natural wine specialty store “HUMAN NATURE” appeared on the show, introduced by Ryusuke Eda of the fashion brand “bal”, and we asked them about how they opened their store, why they chose Kabuto-cho, and the appeal of natural wine.
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Opening a wine event as an opportunity to open a restaurant
Celeina (MC): Let me start with a profile. Shinichi Takahashi studied media studies at a New Zealand university, worked as a barman and in a video production company, and then went on to do a master’s degree at a food university in Italy.He founded HUMAN NATURE in 2015 and is moving to Kabuto-cho, where the store is currently located, in 2019.
Mikachuu after graduating from Nihon University College of Art with a BA in Film Scriptwriting, worked in film promotion and artist management. After working in food event planning and wine festival booking PR, she met Mr. Takahashi and has been working at HUMAN NATURE since 2019.
Takano (MC): You both came to wine after building careers from different fields such as video, film, and media relations. How did you meet?
Takahashi: When I first started my wine business, I had a weekly stall at a farmer’s market in Aoyama, where I also held wine events. We held that event four times, and on that fourth event, Mikachuu was in charge of PR as support and brought in a lot of people.
Takano: What was the process from there to opening the restaurant?
Mikachuu: We had a meeting to discuss bookings and talked about our personal lives, and Mr. Takahashi said, “I’m going to open this restaurant, if you want to join me?”. We had a connection in some aspects of our lives.
Takano: I heard that you started the store to buy natural wine at a reasonable price.
Takahashi: At first, yes. I had been playing without working for about a year after moving to Tokyo, and my savings had run out, so it became difficult to buy wine every day. So I decided to get a license and start buying wine at a vendor’s price.
Celeina：I have the impression that natural wine starts around 3,000 yen in the price range I imagine, but how much are the expensive ones?
Takahashi：In the world of high-end wines, the price is very high, but natural wines are around 20,000 yen at the most.
