When Eiji Daniel Akaboshi came to California two decades ago to venture into winemaking, he thought he was the first in his family to explore a career in America’s vineyards. But someone had already beaten him to it — by 130 years.
“(When I was young) my dad had mentioned in passing that we had a distant relative in California but he didn’t know who he was,” says Akaboshi, 46, a Brazil-born Nikkei raised in Chile and Ecuador, and now a winemaker at the renowned Freeman Vineyard & Winery in Sonoma County. “After I arrived in California, I looked up (my family history) and learned about his story.”
That relative was a great-great-granduncle by the name of Kanae Nagasawa.
