Playing with Wine
posted by philip in Wine
Start practicing your Japanese, as on November 15th, Nintendo is releasing Beginners Wine DS. Nintendo’s first wine ‘game’, sadly only in Japanese, but there’s hope for the rest of us it it takes off over there. And, there’s reason to believe it will - Japan has been a fanatical wine country for a decade now. Witness Wine.com’s only international presence being in Japan and the fact that Bordeaux futures are quite so high because the Japanese market bids them up so much.
The game “features step-by-step instructions on choosing a bottle for a romantic dinner or correctly swirling a glass when wine tasting. The game…also comes with a database of 120 selected bottles, a glossary, a quiz and a guide to bluffing knowledge about wine”.
What I want to see is the same game, but for the Wii. With its motion sensitive remote, you wouldn’t just have to read about how to swirl a glass, you’d be judged on how you swirled the remote. Maybe even on your motion for popping a bottle of bubbly. Heck, you could even try a virtual Champagne Saber.
But, finally, as for a “database of 120 selected bottles”?!? How’s that going to help?
Only 120 bottles?! Sounds like a job for Snooth…
Oh, and according to Food & Wine’s Ray Isle, the release is timed to coincide with this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau (November 15). I can just see the gift sets now…
I think you overlooked the most important reason that this belongs on the Wii, though you allude to it in disparaging their lousy (but presumably “representative” for the sake of the game) selection of wines: integration with Snooth!