Japan piled onto grim headlines when its economy, the world's second largest, officially tipped into recession last week. Pundits thought that the $5 trillion economy might narrowly eke through, but exports were worse hit, corporate spending is sharply off and domestic consumption remains weak.

Despite this, one B.C. exporter bravely announced hopes to expand his sales there. Kelowna-based Quails' Gate Okanagan Valley Winery owner Tony Stewart has been pushing his pinots in Nagoya and Tokyo since 1999. The ball first got rolling when Stewart met Yohei Kuwahara, who spent five years studying at Okanagan University College in the mid-1990s. Today, Stewart works with Kuwahara's brother, Hiro, and the family's Vineyard Kasugai Nenryo Co. to market his B.C. wine in Japan. They ship about 1,200 cases of wine a year to Nagoya and Tokyo, but in recent years the strength of the Canadian dollar has made it tough to do more than tread.

"With the dollar down again, it opens up an opportunity for us to get going," said Stewart. "We don't do a lot of exports, probably about five per cent [of total sales]," said Stewart. The buoyant market at home, in recent years, has given many Canadian producers customers right here, he added. "Now, we would like to get from that five per cent to 10 per cent. It just diversifies us a little bit more."

There may be economic doom and gloom, but without even knowing about it, Stewart could make some strides thanks to a popular Japanese cartoon hero that is boosting wine sales not only in Japan, but also in other Asian markets, including Taiwan, Korea and mainland China.

Meet Shizuku Kanzaki, the star of a comic series called Drops of God, which has captured the imagination and opened the wallets of budding sophisticates, subway-riding salarymen and office ladies alike. Following a request left in his father's will, the character is on a mission to sample and track down "the twelve apostles" or top wines. It is estimated that some 500,000 readers in Japan tune in each week to catch his latest whim. Foreign wine importers in these various markets have, of course, also been watching like hawks. One mention of a brand is enough for an instant sellout of stock. In Korea, translations of the cartoon have apparently propelled sales of wine from less than a third of the market to around 70 per cent of alcohol sales, according to The Daily Telegraph.

"Previously, wine would gain a foothold in magazines or via someone famous," said Avrom Salsberg, B.C.'s Tokyo-based trade representative. "Manga [comics] has taken it to another level ... it goes across all demographics in Japan. People read it on the train, at home, housewives, young people and businessmen alike. It has really driven an increase in the awareness of wine."

Unfortunately, the brother-and-sister team behind this wine hero have a bias for Old World and French wines, in particular.

Said Salsberg: "There are definitely some challenges for Canadian wines here. Canada is not intuitively a wine country to the Japanese. While we produce some very good wines, we don't have anything that characterizes our wine in the way that wines from Australia and the U.K. are known for their robust and heavy Shirazes, or France and Italy, by their history. At best, we are known for our ice wines."

Still, where there is a niche, there is a way, said Stewart, adding that a bottle of Quails' Gate pinot noir is fetching $200 Cdn at a swank restaurant on the 41st floor of a Nagoya skyscraper. "An interest in wine has been established."