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Viticulture

antichaos's Guide to How to Grow Vines

The following is based on extensive research by myself, Varen and others. It deals purely with the process of turning your vine cuttings into grapes. How you go about producing different flavours to boost winetasting skill is a whole other (currently unknown) world.

  1. Water controls the life cycle. Life will naturally drop to 1/4 of its starting value, then recover to 3/4. If you don't water once the cycle is complete, life dwindles to 0. First cycle length is about 18 hours, but I don't have good data on this.
  2. Fertilizer (Fish) controls the grape cycle. Grapes start to grow between 70 and 180 minutes after fertilization and will grow to 99 in 3 hours. Growth starts fast (0.8 grapes/min) and slows to an average of 0.6 grapes per min. Adding fertilizer halts the grapes at the current number and restarts the cycle. You need to fertilize once the grapes max out or they will die off. Die back starts about 30 minutes after peaking. It appears to make NO difference which fish you use. Grapes can still be grown at life 0. Just add fertilizer and the growth cycle will start as normal.
  3. Pruning controls the concentration cycle. Concentration peaks between 11 and 14 hours after pruning (time may be location-dependent). Prune again to fix concentration and restart the cycle, otherwise concentration will revert to 100. Pruning a vine cuts the number of grapes in half.
  4. Small fluctuations in concentration have been observed on unpruned vines. This usually appears sometime in the second growth cycle but whether or not it happens is random as it is not repeatable with location or growth method.

With this information, and a little bit of care and planning, anyone should be able to grow any number of grapes with any desired concentration. The next step is to grow large numbers of similarly grown grapes and experiment with fermentation times to work out how to best bring out the flavour of your wine.

If any of this is unclear, I'm happy to post more details of my research, data, charts etc. I was aiming to do this today, but ran out of time and felt it was more important to get the basic info out.

Some general hints:

  1. It is important to keep good notes, including the age of your vine, fish and water used, values immediately after sealing, time fermenting, date of bottling and date of consumption, as well as flavour.
  2. Grow with a plan. Decide what variables you are going to test, and be thorough. Use the cycle times above to work out when you need to water / fertilize / prune for best effect. A good tip is to check your vine 3 hours after fertilizing. Grapes will have started, and you can work out from the number what time they will peak.
  3. One flavour fact that is known is that residual sugar (which converts into alcohol) is dependent on the total age of the vine. You get about 1 residual sugar per day.
  4. It takes 50 grapes to fill a bottle, so ferment at least 100 at a time, so you can taste one bottle and keep one for later.
  5. Wine supposedly ages in the bottle, so think about setting up some well-labeled long term storage.
  6. Teppy has confirmed that perception increases will occur at 100/200/250 winetasting points.
  7. Don't drink and drive.


antichaos's howto is a great writeup, but is also old and some of the information is inaccurate as a result, so here are a few corrections:

  1. There has been no visible effect on flavor from any growing factor other than the location (microclimate?) and time at which the vine is harvested (vintage?). Fish used, concentration, and fermentation time do not seem to have any effect on flavor.
  2. There is no evidence of wine changing flavor in the bottle. It was a theory at one point, but I've seen nothing proving it.
  3. One thing I'm not sure is made clear is that the Life statistic determines whether you can take a cutting or not. (If it's non-zero and you haven't taken a cutting in the last 8 teppy-hours, you can take a cutting.) As antichaos pointed out, Life 0 does not mean that you can't grow grapes.

Aside from those minor points, this is largely correct and a great guide for going from cutting to grapes. However, you still might not be sure on what you should be doing to optimize the usefulness of your grapes. There are basically four reasons to make wine: Winetasting, Distillation, the Festival of Ra, and the Feast for the Senses.

Grapes for Winetasting

Growing grapes for winetasting requires the least amount of thought, as any grapes will do. You don't need to leave them on the vine, you don't need to get concentration up. The only thing you need to worry about getting is grapes.

Grapes for Distillation

For distillation, what vinetype you use depends on what spirits you want. If you wish to be able to produce a wide variety of spirits, you will want to choose a vinetype that has good tannin production in order to get the higher spirits such as Vegetable, Mineral, and Fish. However, if you just need spirits for Alchemy (which needs only Grain Spirits), then you can use a vinetype with slower tannin but higher residual sugar per day or faster alcohol. For high tannin production, you should choose Black Globe. It doesn't have the fastest alcohol conversion, but it's far from the slowest. If tannin is less of a concern, Honeydrop is probably your best bet as it will convert residual sugar to alcohol faster than any other vinetype.

The one other thing to keep in mind when growing grapes for distillation is that you need to leave your vines up long enough to accumulate residual sugar to convert to alcohol. If you want 12 alcohol wine, you'll need a minimum of 12 residual sugar. Most vinetypes accumulate 2 residual sugar per day.

Grapes for Ra Festivals

Grapes for Ra festivals are similar to those for distillation since you're thinking primarily of high alcohol as a result. However, Ra wines need to be 2 vintages old. That means if you ferment your Honeydrop grapes and get 10 alcohol in 3 days, you still can't use it for Ra for another 10 days at least. This is why Sugar Skin isn't a bad choice for Ra wines (if you're going to use a stock vine). You want to get Ra grapes off the vine as quickly as possible while still accumulating 10 residual sugar so they'll have an older vintage than regular vines, which would need to be up for twice as long and might stretch into a newer vintage. Since once you take the grapes down you still have to wait at least 10 days before any wines made from them can be used for the Ra festival, Sugar Skin's slow alcohol conversion doesn't hurt anything, since it'll definitely be at 10 alc by the time you can actually use the wines. It should be noted, however, that Honey Drop accumulates Residual Sugar at the same rate that Sugar Skin does, so there's no reason not to take advantage of Honey Drop's fast fermentation rate.

Grapes for the Feast for the Senses

These grapes require the most attention by far. Grapes for making banquet wines should have a minimum of 700 concentration and 30 residual sugar. Moreover, they should be good tannin producers, which means that Sugar Skin should definitely be avoided. Black Globe is your best bet here for stock cuttings since it has the highest tannin production of any stock vinetype. It would not be a bad idea to look at getting some good crossbred vine cuttings either, as some of these have better residual sugar production and tannin production than the stock vines. Since you're spending so long on getting the concentration and residual sugar up, you should make sure you get enough grapes per vine to make it worth your while. I would say that you want at the very least 1500 grapes per vine. If you're growing on very few vineyards, you should get even more per vine. You want at least 25000 grapes total, and 100k and up would really be preferable.

I won't go into detail about the winemaking aspects of these at this time, as they're somewhat complicated and require a lot of explanation.


I don't feel comfortable editing the text of this page as it stands, but I compiled all the wine-making information that's here along with all the information I had to find out in game and put it on my own viticulture page. It includes a simple section for people who want wine now and a longer section with all the information about grapes anyone could need.. excluding the precise information on season and microclimate which no one seems to have a solid handle on yet. Anyway, I think it's organized better than this page (because I didn't have to worry about stepping on people's information) and at the very least it works as a very solid companion to this page. Enjoy!

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Last edited May 30, 2004 8:28 pm by Tatsujiro (diff)
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