Video games have come a long way, progressing from Pong to Super Mario Bros. to Halo to vast multiplayer environments, such as World of Warcraft, with impressively complex graphics, stories and mechanics. In between all the sword-swinging and button-mashing and adventuring and crafting, is there any room for video games to celebrate wine? The answer is a big, pixelated, block-lettered “Yes!”
Want proof? Here are a few highlights from wine and video games’ fairly extensive history together. And believe us, there are many more than this …
Wine in Farming, Crafting and Social Simulation Games
Over the past decade, video games focused on crafting items and managing farms and homes have become massively popular, a trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people craved simple and satisfying task-based games. Notably, several well-known titles let the player work as a winemaker (or something akin to one)—whether this is part of the base game (as in Stardew Valley) or added by game modifications (mods), such as Vinery for Minecraft.
Even better, thanks to several new titles, you can now play a game focused specifically on managing and expanding your own vineyard and winery. Is it the real thing? Obviously not. Is there less dirt, sweat and tears than in actual winemaking? Probably.
Hundred Days (2021)
Have you ever dreamt of dropping everything, moving to wine country and establishing your own vineyard and winery? That dream is at the core of Broken Arms Games’ Hundred Days, which allows the player to revive an ersatz winery in Italy. Along the way, the player takes part in every step of the winemaking process, from choosing which grape varieties to plant (Arneis and Barbera, for instance) to harvesting grapes to aging and bottling the wine to selling it. You even design your own bottle labels, check grape bunches for vine disease and receive scores for your wines. It’s a full-on winemaking simulator! Altogether, Hundred Days is an impressively calm game, but don’t let that fool you: The detail here is truly masterly, down to things like vineyard exposure, altitude and soil content. It wouldn’t surprise me if the game inspires a few players to try their hand at winemaking in real life.—C.D.
Available for Windows, Android, macOS, iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
ESRB Rating: E
The Sims 4: Horse Ranch (2023)
In video games directed toward wider audiences, many developers avoid featuring wine or alcohol so that they can maintain their levels of content rating. But there’s an easy way to skirt the rules: Change the name of the tipple. Such is the case in the new Horse Ranch expansion pack—that is, additional content—for Electronic Arts and Maxis' The Sims 4. In The Sims games, players create “Sims”—simulated people—and oversee their lives, including careers, relationships, families, houses and interior decorating. With the latest game add-on, players can have their Sims make “nectar” from grapes, apples, potatoes and other items (including trash). It just so happens that Sims make nectar by stomping these fruits and vegetables, keeping the resulting liquid in barrels and then bottling it in glass, Bordeaux-style bottles. Sims store these bottles on racks, and prices for them increase the longer they wait there. The player can even set an enophile (or is that “nectophile”?) Sim on the path to becoming an “Expert Nectar Maker,” the best in the biz—a particularly great option for Sims that might look eerily similar to real-life winemakers.—J.L.
Available for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
ESRB Rating: T
Wine in Action and Roleplaying Games
Resident Evil Village (2021)
Resident Evil Village is the eighth installment (give or take) in the zombie-themed Resident Evil horror-survival series from developer-publisher Capcom. Like previous iterations, it pits its main character (here, Ethan Winters) against an onslaught of frightening and disgusting monsters. Among these villains is Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, an elegant, nine-foot-tall aristocrat. Near the start of the game, the player infiltrates Lady Dimitrescu’s castle in Romania, solves a series of puzzles, defeats her terrifying acolytes and finally fights her to the death.
While venturing through the castle, the player stumbles upon Lady Dimitrescu’s luxurious Wine Room (a wood table for tasting, a chandelier, racks of bottles, the works) and her cellar of wine barrels. But “wine” is a bit of a misnomer here. These barrels and bottles aren’t just full of grape juice.
Spoiler: Lady Dimitrescu is a vampire, and her castle doubles as a centuries-old winery producing a wine infused with human blood (a wink to the Bram Stoker novel Dracula). The estate’s top cuvée is Sanguis Virginis. At one point in the game, the player places a bottle of said wine in a silver decanting cradle to open a secret door.
Yes, that’s all very gross. And no, people shouldn’t make wine using blood (though they have made Klingon Bloodwine, and real wines can taste a bit bloody, or sanguine, at times). But to be fair, Lady Dimitrescu’s blood wine has some stiff competition for “most disgusting thing” in Resident Evil Village.—C.D.
Available for Windows, macOS, iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
ESRB Rating: M
Hades (2020)
Be blessed by Dionysus, the Greek god of wine himself, in Supergiant Games’ Hades, an indie video game darling. Playing as main character Zagreus (aka Zag), the player spends each round of Hades escaping the underworld (as in the mythological afterlife) and its king, Hades, who also happens to be Zag’s father. Along the way, Zag encounters a cast of Olympic gods who grant the underworld prince new special abilities known as Boons. One of these deities is the suave, purple-haired Dionysus, bedecked in grape bunches and holding a sloshing goblet of wine. Through him, Zag gains aptly named power-ups such as “Premium Vintage,” “Ice Wine” and “After Party.” Dionysus also offers Zag his “Overflowing Cup” as a keepsake, which the player obtains by giving the god a gift of mythical nectar. Seems like a fair trade.—J.L.
Available for Windows, macOS, iOS (coming 2024), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
ESRB Rating: T
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt–Blood and Wine (2016)
What a name! This game is an expansion for Wild Hunt, the third installment in the popular The Witcher fantasy series. (These games are, in turn, based on a series of books by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, which have also been adapted as a Netflix series.) As in the rest of the series, the player takes on the role of Geralt of Rivia, a grizzled warrior in a medieval European–like world inspired by Slavic myth. In this chapter of his journey, Geralt must defeat a mysterious creature killing knights in the fictional land of Toussaint. (Surprise! It’s another vampire.)
Over the course of the journey, Geralt encounters the regional wine industry, including vineyards bearing names that might sound a bit familiar to real-world wine fans: Pomerol, Vermentino and Tufo. Geralt can also partake of specific bottlings, such as white Beauclair wine, rosé Mettina and cheap, low-quality Dijkstra, along with pricey Erveluce—perhaps a nod to the real-world Erbaluce grape grown in Northern Italy? Plus, there’s a wine called Est Est, which might ring a few bells.
At the end of the game, Geralt receives his own wine estate, Corvo Bianco, in the Sansretour Valley (a subregion of Toussaint, which is itself a famed wine region in The Witcher’s lore). Unfortunately, the previous owners left the winery in a state of ruin, but the player can optionally restore it to full glory. Meanwhile, Geralt becomes enmeshed in the local winemaking scene through a series of “Wine Wars” quests.—C.D.
Available for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
ESRB Rating: M
Skyrim (2011)
For the uninitiated, Skyrim is a Norse-themed fantasy adventure game from Bethesda Softworks, part of the studio’s wider Elder Scrolls series. Think magic, dragons, horned helmets, castles, world-ending apocalypses and, you guessed it, wine. That’s right: Between potions, the player in Skyrim can slug down bottles of wine, generally priced at about 7 Septims (in-game currency) and kept in green, thatch-bottomed fiasco bottles.
As in real life, wine affects the player’s mobility and dexterity in Skyrim; frankly, at best, it’s barely useful to drink in the game. You could argue that wine’s role in Skyrim is generally as set dressing, a way to make the game more immersive while the player rests in the many taverns and homes that dot the landscape.
Along with other potables like ale, mead and “Colovian” brandy, Skyrim features a few specific wine labels: Firebrand, Argonian Bloodwine and Surilie Brothers (the player can even visit Surilie Brothers Vineyards in the preceding Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion). There’s also Alto wine, made from the fictional, blue-skinned Jazbay grape variety. Rarer and pricier than the other wines, Alto red is central to a quest in which the player has to make amends after a wild night of drinking with a demon prince named Sanguine. Skyrim gets really weird sometimes.—C.D.
Available for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
ESRB Rating: M
