![]() I don't know why." But he would drink it at university because he had to. "I never drank with my parents," he shrugs. There wasn't wine at the dinner table or in the bottle before bedtime, or anything like that. Curiously, he never drank wine with his family, though. ![]() And the older he got, the more he could help. How could he not? From year five onwards, after he arrived in Italy, wine was the consuming focus of his family life. In the background, Yves Hohler had been learning about wine. "Then unfortunately, in 2007, my mum passed away." In 1990 they opened, in ~1995 they were discovered, and things continued to go well for a decade after. But they championed organic and biodynamic farming winemaking before anyone else in the region did, and as a result, several hard years later, won over the biggest wine critic of the moment with their Barbera red wine. They grew for quantity, not quality, like Hohler's parents, because it wasn't a wealthy area. ![]() No one else in the region grew in that way, you see. They might not have known anything about winemaking, but they did know about fruit farming, particularly apples, so they dug in and applied what they knew to grapes. ![]() They made a go of it, over there, his family. It's not a retelling or anything like that, and it's not a story game, but you can feel that it's rooted firmly in something real, and from that comes a wonderful wash of authenticity, covering everything the game tells you and that you do. Yves Hohler is the lead designer of Hundred Days, and really, this is the game of his life, hence why it's so uncharacteristically personal for a simulation game, and why it feels nostalgic, as if someone were reminiscing over a glass of wine itself. Watch on YouTube Me playing the Hundred Days demo. "For me it was an adventure." Then in his jovial but matter of fact way, Hohler adds: "My mum was crying." Courage or stupidity? It's the exact moment the line refers to. "They couldn't speak Italian." And better: "They knew nothing about producing wine." And better: "And this abandoned house had no heating, and it was winter, and it was like half-a-metre of snow." To recap: that's six of them, the youngest being two six-month-old twins, living in a freezing cold house where it rained in the cellar, but they had no money left for repairs because it was all spent buying the place. "They went to Italy, they looked at it and they bought it," says Hohler. They were not people for sitting on an idea. One day, having just moved back to Switzerland from France, they came across a newspaper in the bottom of one of their boxes, and in it they found a snippet advertising a house for sale in Italy. "And what they wanted," he tells me in a video call, " that we grow up on land, not in a city." "My parents are the last hippies on Earth," Hohler says, affectionately, I think. They did it because they liked the lifestyle. His parents would pick the herbs for them, as well as strawberries for yoghurts. Have you ever eaten those nice Ricola sweets? They come in a bright yellow packet that looks like it should have cigarettes in. They would move around a lot, between Switzerland and France, carting him and three other siblings around as they found work picking herbs on farms. Yves Hohler lived in Switzerland until he was five years old, and What business does it have with philosophy? Unless - and this is what gnawed at me - unless there was a secret behind the game I couldn't see. It's part card game, part management game, part puzzle game. A game about taking on an abandoned winery in Italy and returning it to prosperity. But why? This is a gentle game about making wine. It's one of the first things you see when you load Hundred Days up, even before the main menu.
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