Robo-Bordeaux? Wine Matured With Somber Video Game Soundtrack Promises to Deliver Existential Despair in Every Sip

(Photo: Onkyo Direct)

It’s easy to appreciate how novelty-aged wine and spirits have an outlandish leg up on their comparatively boring competition. Stargazing? Try an outer space-aged bourbon. Aquatic explorer? Consider an illegally ocean-finished wine. Why buy a bottle of Tito’s when you could taste a vodka infused with a meteorite fragment?

Japanese electronics company Onkyo Direct is upping the ante with the unusual addition of video game soundtracks, Rock Paper Shotgun reported. To achieve the feat, Onkyo recruited songs from the action role-playing game “NieR: Automata.” Speakers were directly attached to two sets of barrels, creating a pair of red wines brimming with pixelated gloom.

For those unfamiliar with the premise, “NieR: Automata’s” sprawling twenty-hour odyssey follows a pair of androids fighting robotic alien forces on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The game’s nuanced themes of existentialism and despair — underscored by a decidedly down-beat soundtrack — have garnered a rabid cult following since its release in 2017.

Each wine was matured using songs that pay homage to the protagonist’s respective journeys. While the “2B” android wine aims for a cool, steely attitude, the “9S” wine purportedly exudes naive optimism. Songs used in the process feature vaguely depressing titles like “Widespread Disease,” “Weight of the World” and “Faltering Prayer – Dawn Breeze.”

(Photo: Onkyo Direct)

Whether or not you’re willing to cough up 12,000 Yen ($76) for a personality-infused wine is up to personal preference, although we’ll note that the technique has its fair share of proponents.

Perhaps the best known is the Mozart method, wherein classical music supposedly stimulates greater activity in fermenting yeast. Some winemakers have taken this idea (often dismissed as hoaky pseudoscience) above and beyond, playing classical music year-round in their vineyards to achieve “vibratory waves” and “accelerated metabolism.” Elsewhere, wine has been fermented to the tune of jazz and folk music.

Metallica’s whiskey brand, BLACKENED, is well known for its trademarked “Black Noise” aging process, which involves blasting barrels of aging whiskey with a subwoofer loudly playing the rock band’s music.

Onkyo Direct’s latest release is almost certainly the first of its kind matured using a video game soundtrack.

Each bottle is sold alongside a glass inscribed with the game’s “lunar tear” motif. According to online retailer Aitai Kuji, die-hard fans can expect to pick up the wines sometime in June.

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