You need the Viticulture skill to build a Vineyard. Once you learn that, you need a Vine Cutting to plant in the vineyard. You can tend the vineyard to grow grapes or change the various values (acidity, color, skin) of the vine, and you can take cuttings to grow more vines. Unlike previous tellings, fish is not required to fertilize, and in fact you don't seem to need any materials to grow grapes once the vine is planted.
Unless you're talking about a vine cutting that was just released (as in, released in the last 6-12 hours), your best bet is to ask around. Ask on region chat if anyone has one available; most vintners will have plenty on hand and will be willing to part with them for free or a nominal fee. Additionally, the Egyptian Viticultural Information League will be making an effort to get cuttings to any player that desires them, try asking members of that guild.
Vine cuttings are also available from Universities of Worship with Viticulture unlocked for the cost of one Tilapia fish. However, since we're far past the vines being new, many people will have extras of the basic vines and probably crossbred vines as well.
If you are just starting to grow, ask around in regional chats about crossbred vines or check for public chests for free vine cuttings near chariot stops. Many of the crossbred vines are better than the basic varieties.
Strains from a University of Worship:
Vine cuttings can be taken from a vine every 2 hours (TeppyTime), starting from when the vine was planted. When the vine is planted vigor is at 100, if it drops to 0 you will not be able to take any cuttings.
Vine cuttings of the same strain stack in inventory. This would seem to indicate that cuttings taken from different vineyards/plantings are the same, and do not retain any characteristics of the parent plant.
Vine Starting Stats
| Strain | Acid | Color | Grapes | Quality | Skin | Sugar | Vigor | Color |
| Distraction | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | White |
| Contemplation | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | Light Red |
| Balance | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | Light Red |
| Appreciation | 0 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | Light Red |
| Wisdom | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | Red |
| Amusement | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | White |
| Frivolity | 0 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 | Light Red |
To make grapes grow, you tend them. Each tending reduces Vigor by some amount and increases or reduces other stats. Exactly how depends on the type of grape vine, see below. You may do the first tending immediately after planting, but must wait an hour between tendings thereafter. Nothing happens except when you tend, so you may tend as infrequently as you want.
IMPORTANT: When vigor or grape quantity reaches 0 the vine dies. You must harvest the grapes before vigor drops to 0.
At all times, a vineyard shows one of the following messages (from here on, they will be referred to as the "state" of the vineyard):
A specific vineyard goes through the same sequence of states every time a new vine is planted on it, regardless of how you tend it. So you could grow Distraction and it could start at Sagging, and then go to Musty after tending, to Rustle, back to Musty, etc., and then harvest those grapes. Then, if you planted Contemplation in that same vineyard, you'd see the same progression of states.
Now, because each vine cutting has different values depending on the state and the tend type used, different vine cuttings are better-suited to some states than others. Shimmer, for instance, is a pretty bad state for most known vines, but Balance actually has a pretty good tend type for it, so if you have a vineyard where Shimmer comes up as a state often, you could use Balance on it over other cuttings. Some people have come up with scoring systems to rate your vineyards for the different basic vine cuttings and have linked to them further down the page.
What this also means is that if you map out the state progression of a given vineyard, you can effectively write "recipes" for a given vineyard with a given vine cutting, though in most cases there's usually a tend type that's optimal for most people's needs.
The tending options are:
You can use the Vine Tending QuickTender for quick, easy access to vine tending tables.
To use a Wine Barrel, you must harvest the grapes from your vineyard and load the barrel. For every 21 grapes you put into a barrel, you will later get 1 bottle of wine out. After you have loaded the barrel with your grapes, you must then crush the grapes and seal the barrel. Doing so requires one Barrel Tap. You will then be asked to name this vintage of wine. Once the barrel is sealed, the grapes will begin to ferment into wine. You may siphon a sample of the wine at any time to check its progress without affecting the wine.
A key value for wine barrels is 12% alcohol (at least early in your wine-making). 12% alcohol is required to satisfy the "high alcohol" tasting requirement in the beginner wine notebook (the second requires 13% alcohol wines, so don't forget to make some of those). In order to reach 12% alcohol, you need 6% residual sugar, or a sugar score on your grapes of 12. Grapes with a low sugar score than this will take longer to reach 12% alcohol, though it must be below ~25 before it's really noticeable. The minimum amount of time for any wine barrel to reach 12% alcohol about a RL week.
To see some hard data on fermentation, have a look at Calixes' data here.
Bottled and barreled wines show vintages. Egypt's vintages started at vintage 0 in Akhet I of the first year of the telling, and the current vintage in Egypt is shown when you siphon a taste from a barrel. A new vintage happens on the first of every game month (about every 10 days in RL time). Despite what you see in the barrel, an individual wine's vintage is not locked-in until it is bottled. Though other changes are happening, wine in barrels does not age. The higher the vintage number on a bottle of wine, the younger the wine is.
When looking for wine to drink to satisfy the "vintage" requirements in your wine notebooks, make sure you're drinking a wine that is old enough. For example, if the current vintage in Egypt is 16, and the beginner wine notebook asks for a wine that is at least three vintages old, you need to find bottles of wine that are marked vintage 13 or less.
Wine has flavors dependent on where its grapes were grown. Each time you drink a wine, you will taste flavors depending on your palate, the wine, and the quality of glass it is drunk from. Known Flavors
It is best to drink wine from multiple quality wine glasses. With no palate increase (see below for palate increases) it is best to drink from a 9k glass, a 6k glass and a spot at the table with no glass. The more your palate increases and the more flavors/aromas a wine has you should try to drink it with 7 different qualities of glass ranging from 1k to 9k.
Sometimes when a wine is drunk it will give you a message saying your palate has increased. At this time we are not sure what triggers a palate increase (it may even be random).
If you are looking for someone with a higher palate to try your wine for research purposes you can find them here.
March 2007 - Though I'm certainly not the first person to suggest it, I'm sure now about the way palate increases work, after months of extensive wine making/drinking. Have a look at Calixes' Wine Data my wine guide to see more. ~Calixes
I have considered starting a new character to test this, but my first palette increase came around my 10th bottle of wine. I actually think it is on a per glass basis though. On a hunch, I bottled 30 bottles of low quality wine, and consumed them all on my own. I didn't get a palette increase. Then I tried about 10 more bottles of high quality wine and got my 2nd palette increase. I wish I would have kept better track. This leads me to believe that you must drink a certain number of glasses of a certain quality. It may even use the exact quality numbers of the wine for some sort of formula.
One person has noticed that he keeps getting palette increases from the same wine after it has aged another 2 vintages. He has received 3 palette increases from the same wine so far. Obviously, he is lucky to have many bottles of this wine saved for this purpose and I can not imagine that this is the only way to get palette increases or most of us would be out of luck. I believe it was a particularly high quality wine so it may have to do with some combination of quality and flavors (or just about any other characteristic) particular to each character. My own palette increases also seem to have come from very high quality wines (although I didn't keep careful notes on all of them) so I think quality is probably the important factor, but not the only one. It would be great if people started keeping track of which wines they get palette increases from as well as the quality, flavors, and other statistics of that wine. ~Calen
Palette Improvement When we first started getting palette improvements, the first thing we noticed is that you could taste more flavors from a given bottle of wine, that you got the more subtle flavors (e.g. Hints of....). However, I believe at this time that in addition to depth, the palette improvements also have branches or slots that allow you to taste specific flavors or types of flavors more accurately. Consider this, I have made a bottle of wine and opened it on our local tasting table. I taste the wine, and I get “Spicy” as one of the flavors. My wife tastes the wine and she gets “Licorice”. We are drinking the same wine at the same vintage, from the same glass and so on. The only difference is that two people are drinking it. This has happened consistently with us drinking this wine. It is unlikely she has more palette improvements than I do, quite the contrary it is more likely that I have more, though we have both lost track of the exact number long ago. The rationale that I come up with is that flavors are like they were in Tale 2, people could taste specific flavors while others couldn't.
I mentioned this idea to Calixes to see if I was way off base. She reported back “Cravat said he had a wine for something like 25 vintages, and he never sensed Prune...then he gets a palate increase, and suddenly he nails it.” and “and just now, Yams(YamiJedi), Has(ani), and i drank from the same bottle, same glass...Yams(YamiJedi) and i did not sense the flavor, and Has(ani) did.”
- Telanoc
You can get the notebooks at no cost from a School of Body, though there may be a level requirement. Once you've completed one notebook, return to the school to get the next. There is more involved to filling in the slots of your notebook than simply drinking the number of glasses each category requires; a great deal of variety is necessary. If you are struggling a bit to fill in your notebook, try trading wines with people who have different flavors than you.
They were previously:
Should those be dessert explorations?
Calixes' Wine Tips: revised, expanded, and updated as of July 2007. See also Calixes' Wine Flavor Map. Thanks for all the kind words, folks. I'm glad to be of use. =)
The Production of Fine Wines - A Guide by a slightly tipsey Teper
Shelyak's Vine Genetics Guide: How to find most crossbred vines' full tending tables from 1-3 tendings.
The Vineyard Point System will help you rate the quality of your vineyards. (Updated with newer vines, plus more accurate numbers after further research).
Known Flavors - Please update this list with your known flavors.
flavor map - similar to microbe map for beer, but for wine flavors
Winer is a program that will help find good tending sequences for your vineyards.
VineyardTracker is a tool for tracking and simulating vineyards.
VineSim - Another vine tending spreadsheet.
Grapes Tool is a tool to help with the mixing of different grapes in a barrel.
Isetnefret's VitiSheet is an Excel spreadsheet with tending data for all original vines as well as some hybrids. Also includes template for adding your own vines/data.
Tending Insight is a discussion about preferred vine tending and why previously proposed point systems may not paint the entire picture.
WineTests.pdf - Table showing a the development of flavors in a set of ten wines over a period of time.
A value never falls below zero ( a value is something like color or acid) . so , when starting out, pick one or two stats to ramp up, and dont worry if you get -3 acid 4 times in a row, because on the fifth time, if it gets +1 , its not going to be (-12 +1 = -11 ) it will be just +1. This is very important for overall tending strategies
A bottle of wine in RL averages out to have about 87.7% water, 11% alcohol, 1% acid, and 0.2% tannin. Could this explain why sometimes a wine made of high quality grapes doesn't have a high quality? too much or too little tannin or acid could greatly effect the wine. ~Ender
Wines that start Thin appear to take a quality penalty; when they develop flavors, they are often at lower-than-predicted wine quality levels. Another influence on wine quality is the number of types of grapes in the barrel. If you barrel two different batches of grapes with Quality 80, the result tends to be a better wine than if you had bottled one batch of grapes with Quality 80. -Shelyak
| Strain Info and Confrimed Data | Raw Data |
| Amusement | Data |
| Appreciation | Data |
| Balance | Data |
| Contemplation | Data |
| Distraction | Data |
| Frivolity | Data |
| Wisdom | Data |
| Hybrid Vines |
| Name | Creator | Date | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WineTests.pdf | Telanoc | May 22, 2007 1:26 am | 17146 | Table of Tasted Wine Flavors |