Ernest Singer

Ernest Singer is a winemaker in Japan known for promoting the use of the Koshu grape in Japanese wines. His father was a computer engineer.

Over the years he was involved in a variety of businesses including real estate, travel, promotion and computers. He became interested in the wine business, and started Millesimes, a wine importer. He hired Denis Dubourdieu, professor of oenology at the University of Bordeaux to help him make his own wine using the Japanese Koshu grape. DNA testing suggests that it is a hybrid of , a European wine grape species. Because of Koshu's growing international recognition, Yamanashi was able to use Koshu to achieve the highest Japanese wine production of any prefecture. Yamanashi has worked to increase the land under cultivation and set a target for the production of 1,000 tons of Koshu in 2025.

Joint project with other Japanese winemakers In the past Koshu wines produced in Japan were quite sweet, but Singer was inspired by an experimental dry Koshu wine he tasted. He decided to concentrate on dry Koshu and convinced other Japanese winemakers such as Shigekazu Misawa at Grace Wine that this was the best way to make quality wines suitable for export. They exchanged ideas and many companies became involved. Some of these banded together as the Koshu of Japan organization. Sugar levels of the Koshu were low compared to varieties grown overseas, but Dubourdieu decided not to add sugar before fermentation, leading to a wine with an unusually low alcohol level of nine or ten percent. He explained that other such wines exist and are acceptable, such as Vinho Verde from Portugal.

In 2013 they went on to create a sparkling version of Koshu. The dosage (sugar added after second fermentation) for that vintage was only 2 grams per liter.

Approval for import into the EU Wine regulations are much stricter in the EU than in Japan. For example, in 2008 the Japanese government required that only five percent of the grapes in a wine be from Japan to qualify to be labelled as a Japanese wine., Even so, in 2008, Singer's Koshu wine "Shizen Cuvee Denis Dubourdieu" was the first Japanese wine to be accepted by the EU for import. Singer is involved in a long-term cooperative project with Chubu University to produce grape vines that are virus free. Authors from two of his companies, from Chubu University and from another university published a paper describing their process for creating virus-free vines. Millesimes and Asagiri Agriculture were both Singer's companies

In November 2022, Fujisan Winery announced a cooperation with Golan Heights Winery in Israel to mass-produce virus-free vines.

Personal life Singer has six children from three different partnerships.