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Calixes' Guide to Viticulture

Hey, new vintners! I suggest you look at my Quick Start Guide first. It'll give you enough information to get going. You can dig into the inner workings later on.

News

• Feb 2008 - Overhaul time! I'm due to update, and I think I can condense this page to make it easier to read. Pardon my mess while I'm working on it.
• Jan 2008 - Finally made a spreadsheet that will simulate 100 vineyards to test the usefulness of crossbred vines. It's too big to attach, but if you contact me, I can email it.
• Sep 2007 - My Wine Flavor Map is finally ready for the public. Hope it helps!

In This Guide

New? Start Here!

• The Basics - start here if you're new to wine making or you're looking for just the facts, ma'am. I've done what I can to make sure there's not much overlapping information between The Basics section and the rest of this guide, so don't overlook it!
• Uses - what can you use wine for?
  
• Clocking It - a breakdown of how much time that killer wine is going to take you to produce.
  

And if that doesn't scare you off...=)

General Information

• Misconceptions - a few ideas that need debunking.
  
• Links - a few wine-related links.
  
• Testing and Tasting - making the most of your time.
  
• Building Vineyards Strategically - ideas to help maximize output.
  
• Comments and Acknowledgments - speak up!
  

Grape Stats

• Grape Stats - what do those stats do?
  
• Fermentation or Instabottling - how much alcohol do you need?
  
• Wine Color - color is fun!
  
• Notes on Quality - quality threshold ideas.
  
• Notes on Sweetness - sweetness threshold ideas.
  
• Vines - which vine is right for you?
  

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Flavors Plus Lots That May Bore You To Tears ;)

• Flavors - getting the most flavors possible.
  
• Mixing Flavors - some notes, ideas and guidance.
  

Consumption Junction

• Why is my wine "Thin?" - explanations of how/why this happens.
  
• Your Wine Table - setting up your tasting table so you're not wasting precious liquid.
• Drinking for Points - wine notebooks and you.
  
• Palate Increases - some basic information and theory.
  

Correcting Basic Misconceptions

T1/T2 data about wine making needs to be pitched as much of it has changed. A couple of things that are no longer the case under the new system:

• That flavors are found in 64x64 coord grids or that you have to mix grapes from all over Egypt.
• That a tasting table needs to have all 9k+ quality glasses.

Beyond those, I've noticed a couple of other basic misconceptions:

• That palate increases are tied to completed wine notebooks.
• That Ubervine X with a string of mutations longer than this sentence is the best vine to use.

Read on to see more. We're learning more every day. This page is the result of my own work and collaboration/conversations with a lot of enthusiastic vintners. None of this is set in stone. It changes as we learn more. I'll do my best to keep it current and correct. If your data differ from mine, please don't hesitate to add a bubble on the page or try and talk to me in game. We'll learn more if we all work together. =D

Wine Uses

Wine has several practical and fun uses in the game.

• Wines of different flavors, ages and alcohol levels are needed in two of the seven festival types for the Test of Festivals.
• 21 bottles of wine of different tannin levels, alcohol levels and ages are needed for a player successfully to pass the Test Of The Banquet.
• Wines with high tannin and/or residual sugar levels are useful for producing various spirits.
• Drinking wine is one of the ways a player may gain permanent Perception points.
• Sharing wine with friends is fun, and it's a common party pastime in Egypt. =D

Grape Stats - What Do They Do?

This is all still sort of in the aether (and feel free to add a bubble here to add your own ideas), but from my experience and conversations with other vintners, here's a general idea:

Acid	Acid seems to determine a wine's lifespan. Good acid (possibly combined with Quality) seems to mean a quicker rise to better quality in the bottle and a longer lifespan (quality and flavors stay longer).
Color	This stat (in some combination with Grapes and Skin plus residual color in the barrel) determines your wine's color. It seems that the vine(s) used to need to have color mutations on them to get anything other than white, though.
Grapes	Apart from the obvious, grape quantity seems to play a role in color. More grapes seem to dilute it.
Quality	Quality (maybe combined with Acid) seems to be the main determinant for whether a flavor appears at its full strength (ex: "Roses" rather than "Floral Notes"
Skin	This is the main stat required for tannin production. (Please correct me if someone's learned different, but Color seems necessary to make the tannin magic happen, too.)
Sugar	In the barrel, sugar turns into alcohol (more info on that below). In the glass, it determines a wine's sweetness category.
Vigor	This is the vine's life. As you tend your vines, this number drops from 100 toward 0. If you let it hit 0, and the vine dies, taking all your hard-won grapes with it.

Stat Theory

So...All this begs the question, what grape stats are desirable when you're tending? Well, this ultimately depends on the use you intend (drinking, spirit-making, tests). Let's assume that you want grapes that will give you good drinking wines and that you might end up using some of them for tests later on.

My personal recommendation is that you focus on Acid (maybe 15+), Sugar (50+) and as much as you can get in Grapes/Quality. These stats should maximize the quantity, quality and flavors of your wine while also prolonging its life. If you're looking for general purpose wines, it's tough to go wrong like this.

How much time does wine making take?

Making your own wine requires a substantial investment of time if you plan to do it on a grand scale. If your goals are more modest, though, you can create great wines with very little actual time spent in game fiddling with things. It takes a considerable length of RL time passing, though, so this might not be a great hobby for you if you're impatient. Here's a rough idea of what it would take to produce a nice bottle (assuming all supplies except for grapes already exist).

Producing grapes:

Time required (best case scenario): one to three RL days.
This varies depending on the vines, the vineyards, and the style of tending you use, but vines can be tended about once per RL hour, and it takes roughly 10-20 tends to reduce a vine's vitality to <10. Depending how much time you spend in game and tending vines, this could take a one to three days, or it could take much longer.

Efficiency tip for those with a lot of vineyards: If you use a reliable hybrid like Eigam Copper, you can create a tending cheat sheet with your favorite tend methods to use on all of your vineyards ("reliable" meaning unlikely to be killed due using too many tends with grape loss). This greatly reduces the time it takes to do the tending at the possible expense of a little overall quality/quantity since you won't be tailoring your tends to suit each vineyard. Using this method makes it much easier to tend many vineyards relatively quickly.

Harvesting and mixing grapes:

Time required (best case scenario): less than one hour.
Except for the time it takes for you to cart your grapes home, decide what to put into which barrel, and actually load them in (there's usually enough lag involved that this can be a little annoying for large batches), this is instantaneous. There is no timer involved for crushing the grapes in the barrel like there was last telling.

Be sure not to forget your barrel taps, though.

Aging in the barrel (fermentation and tannin development):

Time required (best case scenario for 12% alcohol): about one RL week.
This varies depending on how much alcohol/tannin you want in the wine (I recommend nothing less than 12% so that all wine is usable for alcohol requirements in at least the first notebook and also to cover Ra/Thoth requirements in the Test of Festivals. You can get 10% in about 24h with a decent vine. 12% takes about a RL week. 13% takes about a RL month. 14% takes ~3 RL months.

Keep in mind, though, that most of the wine you need for notebook drinking doesn't need to have any alcohol at all. You can grab that wine right from the barrel the second after you seal the tap if you don't care about using your wine for other things.

Note that these are estimates - the time can vary some depending on grape sugar. More on that further down.

Aging in the bottle (flavor development):

Time required: zero time to several RL months, depending.
There are many flavors that take time to develop once the wine is in the bottle. Some flavors take more than 3 RL months before you'll get any indication that they're in the wine. Wine quality also changes as it ages in the bottle, rising and then falling, though the mechanics of what affects the speed of this curve are not really understood. To take full advantage of these changes, it's important to make enough of each wine that you can taste it each vintage (or every few vintages) as it ages. Be patient and save some for later. It's worth it.

So basically, you can have a number of bottles of a nice 12% alcohol wine in probably ten RL days, if you spend enough time in game to tend the grapes quickly (keeping in mind that your wine might not show any flavors until it's aged a while in the bottle). Don't let casual play hinder you, though! The only obstacle to the casual player's wine making is the grape tending, but all of the waiting necessary while the wine ages will be nothing to you. It might take you longer on the front end, but your wines will be just as nice. =)

Wine Flavors

There are a lot of things that determine what flavors your wine can have, how strong those flavors are and which you can actually taste when drinking, so I'm going to break this down as much as possible with an eye toward maximizing flavors.

Vineyard Placement

Wine flavors are in blobs similar to beer microbes.

• Blobs can overlap with others.
• Blobs can be as small as a coordinate (maybe even smaller) or can be many coordinates wide.
  • Most seem to be at least 4-8 coordinates, so setting your vineyards at least that far apart is a good idea.
  • Clustering your vineyards tightly, while space-efficient, is wasteful. You'll get only few flavors compared with the bunch you'll likely get if you spread them.
• Blobs do not restrict themselves to coordinates, meaning they can start or stop anywhere, even stopping a quarter of the way into a coordinate.
• Different blobs of the same flavor can be different sizes.
• Blobs appear to be circular, but sometimes other flavors interfere and can obscure this.
  • Flavor strength when drinking (see "Flavor Intensity") seems to depend on how close your vineyard is to the center of the blob as well as on some combination of grape stats (guessing acid and quality).

There is no apparent pattern to where you can find flavors.

• Region does not seem to affect flavors at all.
• It's possible to find most every known flavor within a few hundred coordinates.

Grape Stats

Your wine's overall quality is important when it comes to being able to taste flavors.

• A wine made with grapes that have 0 Quality on the vine will be Thin (no flavor) when consumed, and it will probably stay that way despite aging.
• My pet theory about grape stats affecting flavor: I think each flavor has a quality threshold that must be met for it to show up at full strength (seeing Raisin rather than Dried Fruit, for example). This threshold is different for each flavor. In some, like Licorice, it's quite low, so you can taste it easily in low quality glasses. In others, like Lemon, it's higher and harder to meet, so you tend to need higher quality glasses to taste it. The stats that seem to be involved in the equation seem to be Quality and Acid.

Aging the Wine

• Each flavor has an age (see "Vintages") it must attain before it can be tasted in the wine. There is nothing you can do to alter/speed up this process.
  • A flavor's age will always be the same. Some flavors, like Hazelnut, can be tasted immediately with no aging at all (see "Instabottling"). Strawberry will always need to age one vintage until it can be tasted. Prune will always need to age eleven vintages, etc.
    • You can find a list of all the currently known flavors and their ages here. Please add any new ones you may find.
  • This aging must happen in the bottle. Aging in the barrel seems only to be important for alcohol and tannin production; it seems to have no impact on flavor at all.
• Flavors are binary. They're either there or they're not, even if the wine isn't old enough for the flavor to be tasted.
  • This is useful to know for Festival wine ambrosia production, because you need only worry about the wine being old enough to meet the Festival's age requirement.

Your Tasting Table

• For optimal tasting, your Ceremonial Tasting Table must be set up with a selection player-made glasses of diverse quality.
  • See for more information on setting up your table for efficient drinking.
  • While very important for drinking wine, these glasses have no apparent effect on beer drinking.
• There are caps in place on the number of flavors you can taste in a glass of wine at once.
  • How many vineyards were used in making the wine determines this cap.
    • You can taste up to three flavors in one glass of wine that used grapes from one vineyard.
    • You can taste up to seven flavors in one glass of wine that used grapes from two or more vineyards.

Your Palate

• You need to improve your palate (see "Palate Increases") several times at least such that you can taste multiple flavors at once and taste all flavors possible.
• Palates seem to be individual. You and your friend may not be able to taste all of the same flavors.
• Theory (untested): some of the rarer flavors may only be tasted by people with very highly developed palates (or those who happened to luck into natural high aptitude for those flavors).

Flavor Complexity and "Intensity Categories"

As discussed above, vineyard location, grape quality, tasting glasses, your palate, etc. all play a role in what you can taste when you drink. To further muddle matters, let's break this down. =)

Intensity Categories When you drink a glass of wine, the flavors will show up in different categories in the glass: Overflowing, Bursting, Intense, Ample, Displays, Hints and Fluttering, to be brief. You can see an almost perfect example of this in the image to the right. Each flavor is in a distinct category. Intensity categories are determined at the outset partially by how far away your vineyards are from the centers of the flavor blobs in the area. The overall quality of your grapes also seems to have an effect on this, but that's not been solidly proven yet. When I talk about flavor intensity, these categories are what I'm talking about.
Flavor Complexity Each wine flavor is two- or three-tiered; each major flavor has a simple part (tier 1), a mid-range part (tier 2, though some flavors like Hazelnut don't have this middle one), and a complex part (tier 3). (The flavor page I just linked refers to these as "Taste Category," "Primary Tastes," and "Secondary Tastes," respectively.) What level of your flavors you taste in the glass seems to be mostly determined by your grapes' overall quality, the quality of the glass you use when drinking and a little on your own individual palate. This is solid information, though there may be other factors that come into play. If you compare the image above with the one to the right, you'll see the differences in complexity you can see from one bottle of wine in different glasses. The upper picture shows the most complex flavors (tier 3). The image to the right shows some of the middle flavors and then the lowest. When I talk about flavor "strength," this is what I'm referring to.

Excerpted from a forum thread, quoting Dakiara:
"For me, the intensity of flavours has shown a direct correlation with the proximity to "centres" of each flavour blob (though indeed on mixing there has been occasionally a slight decrease on expected flavour intensity - I had previously put this down to differences between the numbers of grapes used however in the mixes).

Most of my wines are pretty much 80-100 quality, so not a huge variation there. However, I have tracked flavours (by planting new vineyards around tested ones) when they were "Displays" (and others). For example, moving to test new yards 3 coords in a specific direction from the original "Displays" yard has resulted in "Overflowing" for the originally weak flavour. I have repeated this several times and tracked several flavours to get "Overflowing" in them all so far (for both "Displays" and other, weaker intensities).

(I have also noticed that there is a chance of flavours from nearby vineyards coming in at later than expected vintages depending on their intensities, possibly quality as well, and how far away from these "flavour centres" the yard is, though this is more of a suspicion at this stage rather than something I have tracked with actual evidence)."

Note: Wines are often referred to only by their most complex flavor, so when someone says a Mint flavored wine, for example, that is only its most complex flavor. I call this a single flavor wine. It would be possible also to taste Mint's tier 1 and tier 2 flavors when drinking it. A Mint/Apple wine would have also the tier 1 and tier 2 flavors from both Mint and Apple, etc. when drunk from wine glasses of the proper quality.

Why is my wine "Thin?"

As far as we know, there are two possible reasons:

• Your wine needs to age.
• Your grapes were very low quality.

Aging Some wine flavors won't show up at all until a wine has aged in the bottle. This is just a case of your wine having flavors that cannot be tasted until the wine has aged in the bottle long enough. Some flavors can take 15+ vintages (several RL months!!) of aging in the bottle before they will show up.

Poor Quality Grapes This is still imperfectly understood, but it's no longer questionable that low quality can affect whether a flavor can show up or not. It's apparent also that the overall quality of your grapes can affect what quality glass is needed to taste the full flavor. There are equations at work behind the scenes here that we may never know, but it's clear that you want the best quality you can manage from your vine.

Did a test recently on 2 adjacent vineyards each with the same 2 known V0 flavors. Tended once to get 21 grapes, then instabottled. With quality 0, the wine showed as "thin." With quality 8, the flavors were present. ~Shebi

Yes, I've been kicking around an idea about flavors having individual quality thresholds for a while now...I think I can now confidently say that this is true and that the threshold can be vastly different for different flavors...The part I'm not yet sure of is what combination of grape stats is directly responsible for it (seems like acid/quality). Lest we scare you newer growers, though, it's worth noting that I do most of my growing using Cali's Favorite - not a vine to use if you want high quality. I usually end up with ~30-50 Quality when I'm done tending, and most of the time, that's enough to get the flavors to show up. To date, I'm only missing a handful of all the known flavors. ~Cali

Building Vineyards Strategically

The old rules have changed.

In previous tellings, different flavors were achieved by mixing grapes from different regions. If you wanted a lot of wine flavors, it was very important to have vineyards all across Egypt and at the map edges or to trade grapes with others in different regions.

This telling, it's possible to find almost all the known wine flavors in a relatively small area, and region seems to be completely inconsequential. With that in mind:

• Build your vineyards close to home to make tending and carting home grapes easier.
• Build them along paths you travel frequently so you naturally tend more often.
• Though you'll see it done all over Egypt, don't cluster your vineyards tightly. Most flavor spots seem to be at least a few coordinates apart, so if you leave some space between them, you're more likely to pick up more flavors.
• Building in lines, in grids or in a combination will work fine...Just be sure that you're not building them too close together. It's probably a good idea to leave at least 4-5 coordinates between them.

64-coordinate gridlines, elevation, region...These were all things that either used to be important or that we thought might be. There is no evidence to suggest that any of these is at all relevant to flavor, so build where you like!

Which vine(s) should I use?

Look for a crossbreed.

There are many to choose from, certainly...many more than will ever make it to the wiki. There are several hybrids available that are better than the basic vines you can get at the universities, so choose a hybrid. Check for chests of free vine cuttings around busy chariot stops; I know there's one in UE by the Essence of Harmony at the CS there. Contribute vine cuttings when you can so others can benefit. Every vine is useful, if only for crossbreeding purposes.

Don't be fooled.

I occasionally hear people chattering about the latest vine or talking about X vine that has a gazillion mutations on it. These folks are making an understandable mistake when they assume that a lot of mutations means a better vine. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A vine having 10 sugar mutations or 6 quality mutations doesn't guarantee that it's going to grow a lot of grapes or even very good ones. The reason? Without me getting into explanations of tend tables vs. mutations, it's easy to see that while one vine may have a tend that can add 40 grapes or quality or whatever, it often is taking away a lot from the other stats, and you need those other stats to be good, too!

Remember, please - I'm coming at this both as a vine breeder and a grower, and I've learned the hard way. I'm not going to tell you that my super-duper new crossbreed is the new "gotta have it" vine. Don't be impressed by a long string of mutations. Ask around. Do the research and find a vine that's going to do what you need it to do. Your wines will end up so much better for it.

I second that! -OnlyAloha

My Recommendations:

Purpose	Vine(s)
General use (good grapes/quality/sugar)	* Eigam Copper Plus - great all-around vine * Eigam Copper - same vine but starts with 3 fewer grapes
Vineyard flavor testing (good grapes/sugar, ~50 quality)	* Eigam Bronze * Cali's Favorite/Calixes#116 - a tad faster, but slightly lower quality and less sugar
Very high sugar/quality (low grapes)	* Rauul#59 * Shawn Standard * Calixes#125
Tannin production	* Tedra's Tannin - still tops for tannin * Calixes#87 - bit less tannin, bit more grape output
RS-based spirits	* Eigam Bronze - VERY high sugar (like 1k+) and good grape output
Colored wine	* Cali's Color/Calixes#132 - (still testing) * Tedra's Tannin - can do color fairly well

I have tested these enough to be pretty certain that they're going to be pretty consistent on a broad range of vineyards, though Rauul#59 and Shawn Standard can be a little touchy...pay close attention when you use any tends with a negative to grape quantity, or you could kill the vine!

I have converted my original flavor test grid into a place for the public to come get vine cuttings. All of my own crosses are there as well as many from other breeders. You can find it a short run WSW of the UE CS at 1500, 3615. The ability to separate permissions such that people can take cuttings is currently broken in game; I will update this again once it's fixed. In the meantime, check your local public vines chest (there's a good one perhaps 10 coords south of the UE CS by the Essence of Harmony) or ask me.

Barreling and Bottling

If you're on this page, then you've probably already read (or knew the info included in) my beginner's guide, so I'll skip the basics here. It seems necessary to harp on a few points, though, so bear with me. =)

• Take good notes! Unless you're doing this very casually, take detailed notes (at least) on your grapes and on the wine at time of barreling, bottling, and tasting. That way, you can reproduce any results you like and easily mix flavors. Unless you want to track alcohol conversion and tannin production, though, there's no need to take notes on the wine while it's cooking in the barrel.
• Holy Grape Info, Batman! You may check harvest information on your grapes at any time by holding them in your inventory, and using the Self -> Special -> Examine Grapes menu. This will tell when and where the grapes were harvested, their stats at harvest, their color, and how long left until they will spoil (or if they already have - handy).
• Know about grape sugar/RS as relates to how much alcohol you want in your wine. Residual sugar (RS) is 1/2 of the sugar value of the grapes on the vine. Higher RS = quicker conversion to alcohol up to about 10.7% - beyond that the conversion rate plummets for pretty much every full point gain thereafter. You want some really sweet wines for notebook tastings or for alembic work, but for the most part, high sugar isn't necessary.

Wine Color

Each barrel you use retains some color through a batch or so after a particular wine was there. If you put white grapes into a barrel that just previously held a red wine, your wine will likely be something in between in color. Color has no affect on wine tasting, though it's fun to have something other than white.

If you want to experiment with color, try using a vine with at least two color mutations (generally notated 'CC' or 'C2'); Frivolity has it, as do several hybrids I've seen. You can check my vines page to see which of my crossbreeds might apply, or you can ask around for information on other people's hybrids.

Colors I've noted so far when combining grapes/using barrel residue:

• White
• Rose
• Light Red
• Red
• Dark Red
• Purple-Red
• Purple
• Deep Purple

Color darkness appears to be some function of the Color attribute plus the Skin attribute, divided by the Grapes attribute. Color seems to contribute more than Skin. Eigam Copper and Calixes#24 very consistently paint wines white. ~Shelyak

Alcohol (Fermentation vs. Instabottling)

Fermentation is the conversion of residual sugar into alcohol while in the barrel. Instabottling is the practice of removing the wine from the barrel immediately after sealing it. Whether you should let your wine ferment or instabottle it depends on the use you have planned.

If your only planned use is testing a vineyard's flavors or sharing a little wine with friends, instabottling is generally the way to go. Alcohol doesn't affect flavors at all, apparently. You can age an instabottled wine in the bottle and still taste the same flavors you would if the wine had a bunch of alcohol. Another bonus is that a couple of the wine notebooks have "Sweetness" categories, and instabottled wine has more sugar than it would if you'd let it ferment.

But...If you want to use your wine for tests, for specific notebook categories or for spirit production, it's probably a good idea to let it ferment for a while. The third notebook requires some 13% wine, and the fourth notebook has a really awful 14% alcohol category, but these are exceptions. If you want to allow your wine to ferment for general use, 12% alcohol is good. It will cover most Banquet alcohol requirements and both Festival ambrosia types as well.

Fermentation happens on an evil sliding scale - not at a constant rate. Early on, it moves quickly, but the higher the alcohol level gets, the more the conversion rate slows down.

10% alc wine can take less than 24 hours with good grape sugar.
12% alc wine (needed for the first wine notebook) takes roughly a week in the barrel.
13% alc wine (needed for the second wine notebook) requires roughly three RL weeks.
14% alc should take something along the lines of three RL months in the barrel.

See this page for hard data/images on RS -> alcohol conversion.

Wine Sweetness

Wine sweetness is based on grape sugar reflected as the percentage of RS (residual sugar) left in the wine after bottling. If you're instabottling wine, this will be higher, as none of the RS has had time to ferment (useful for filling in "Sweet" wine slots in the second wine notebook, when need be).

Wine sweetness does not change during aging in the bottle.

Work in Progress: These numbers are based on "instabottling" and immediately tasting wine.

Textual Representation	Grape Sugar (Instabottle)	Wine RS
Pharaoh's dessert	Ridicu-high (using Eigam Bronze)	(?)
Mind-bogglingly Sweet	?	?
Luxuriously Sweet and Haunting	357...600...?	357
Rich, Honeyed Dessert	160- (?)	(?)
Luscious	81+ (?)	>40%?
Light, Almost Dessert	55-77	20-40%?
Delicious	20-38	10-20%?
Warm Hint	10-19	5-10%?
Fluttering	5-9	?-5%
Dry	0-4	<2.5%?

One of my grape juice flavor tests was reported as a "hard wine, extremely dry" with a RS of 0. On the other end of the scale, I got "A wine that would stand alone as Pharaoh's dessert" from an Eigam Bronze wine. ~Shebi

Another one to add: "mind bogglingly sweet, syrupy" seems to fall just below Pharaoh's dessert. ~Shebi

Wine Quality

There seem to be factors at work here other than simply the numeric quality value of your grapes when you barrel them, but I don't know the mechanics. Let's just say that obscenely high quality in your grapes is probably not going to hurt. =) I always aim for a minimum 50 quality, but get it as high as you can.

Be aware that a wine's quality changes as it ages in the bottle, increasing and eventually decreasing (the rate of this shift is dependent on some combination of wine stats as yet undetermined, though Acid seems to play a big role).

Work in Progress: These numbers also courtesy of Shelyak, whom I believe is working on a theory about how quality works beyond the bare numbers. For a batch of grapes harvested off one, and only one, vineyard, these appear to be the textual quality levels corresponding to specific grape quality values at vintage age 0.

Textual Representation of Quality in the Glass	Grape Quality
Pharaoh's private collection
Describe to grandchildren
Moved to tears
Historic
Stupendous
Luxury
Spectacular
Astonishing
Stunning	Qual 120
Graceful	Qual 103
Very passable	Qual 83-85
Hint of character	Qual 4-64

When multiple harvests of grapes are combined in a barrel, the starting quality textual representation is based on some function of the sum of the quality of all the grapes in your barrel, not the average of it. To test this, throw more than one different harvest of Quality 80-100 grapes with a Vintage 0 flavor into a barrel and enjoy the product wine, which will be better than 'Very Passable.' The most astonishing example of this I've seen came from a MomMouse bottling of roughly a dozen Quality 100+ MomMouse#18 harvests; the resulting wine was at the 'Moved to tears' level at Age 1. ~Shelyak

Other factors at work? Just tasted grape juice from a single vineyard with grape quality 60, and it registered as 'Stunning' quality, which differs from the numbers above. Perhaps my earlier numbers were incorrect, or perhaps there are other factors at work that determine quality rating. ~Calixes

Recent experiments seem to suggest that acid may affect starting quality. A high quality (125 if using weighted average) low acid (0.9) wine showed up as "hint of character" at V1, while a lower quality (5) high acid (7.1) wine appeared as "graceful." Both were mixed wines (>1 grape harvest) though, so more research is required. ~Shebi

In light of the quality requirement in the fourth notebook, it seems worth noting that if you want to get "Pharaoh's Cellar" quality wine, all you really need to do is throw a bunch of Eigam Copper harvests together into a barrel - the more vineyards used, the better. The resulting wine should come out pretty high quality to start with and shouldn't take more than a few vintages to hit the mark. I did this a lot earlier in the telling. It was rare that the wine didn't reach that level. ~Cali

A suggestion for making nice wines while you're testing for flavors:

1. Find a hybrid vine - many of them are better than the basic vines.
2. Grow the best grapes that time allows...I tend to focus on acid, quantity, quality and sugar when tending.
3. "Instabottle" and taste one bottle of wine from each of your vineyards to see what flavor(s) it has before it ferments or ages. (By "instabottle" I mean putting grapes into a barrel and bottling them immediately.)
4. Barrel 5-10 bottles' worth of grapes from each vineyard (unmixed with other grapes). Allow to ferment as long as you like (I aim for 12% alcohol though alcohol doesn't affect flavor), and then bottle and stash it for aging. You should try to do this in two or three batches, and alter your tending of the vineyard just a little each time so the final grape stats differ. You'll stow away enough bottles that you can taste them over perhaps 25 vintages, and at the same time, you'll be doing your best to ensure that you won't miss any flavors due to quality issues. Taste one bottle from each vineyard at the start of each new vintage (or every other, or every third) to see what additional flavors show up. Record the flavors you get. The flavors you get from each vineyard will stay the same (meaning a vineyard that gave you Apricot, Orange Blossoms, and Plastic won't suddenly change and give you a bunch of different flavors).
5. Use any "scrap grapes" together in a barrel to create flavor mixes, and allow them to reach 12% or 13% alcohol before bottling; these tend to make really nice, complex, higher quality wines for drinking.

This process allows you to know what each of your vineyards produces so you can mix more effectively later on. You'll gain tasting points in your notebooks while flavor-testing your vineyards, and the "scrap grape" wines turn out wonderfully.

Mixing Multiple-Flavor Wines

As talked about above, many flavors require aging in the bottle before you can sense them in the wine. Wine acquires additional flavors over time depending on the spots where the grapes were grown and some combination of stats that rules which will show up the strongest. I've determined that while flavor is definitely binary, there is a cap on how many flavors are present in the wine (even when the wine is too young to see them).

Vintage Zero (v0) Mixes

It is possible to have wines that have more than one major flavor at v0 by using grapes from a vineyard which is in the overlap of two or more zero vintage flavor spots or by mixing grapes from different zero vintage flavor spots. (A "zero vintage flavor" is a flavor that can be sensed when consumed immediately after bottling with no aging required. Ethanol, Peach, and Hazelnut are examples of these.) Please note that you will never see more than seven flavors in a glass of wine at any time, so choose your mixes wisely. Those zero vintage flavors you put into a wine will linger as the wine ages, taking up space that could be occupied by other flavors. This is important when it comes to the third and fourth wine notebooks or for the Test of Festivals when you need specific flavors.

How many flavors can your wine have when drinking?

This is a little tricky, because the number we can taste in a glass at once is capped artificially. There may be more flavors in the wine, but the system limits how many you can possibly taste at once.

If your wine is made of grapes from one particular vineyard, it will have a maximum of three flavors (though it may need to age for months in the bottle for them all to show up in the glass). If you're blending grapes from two or more vineyards, you can taste up to seven in the glass at once.

It's important to know that even though you can't always see them in your flavor tests, your vineyards can produce more than three flavors, so when you mix grapes from two vineyards, you can see up to the cap of seven flavors in the glass. That means that there's a chance the flavors you want could actually "fall off" at least temporarily if they're not among the strongest of the bunch. This is the best possible argument for making sure your vineyards are placed closed to their flavor "centers" and that you're using really good quality grapes.

I have noticed that the flavors that don't end up in the glass don't just disappear completely, though. Although these extra "fallen" flavors won't help you, say, with Festival ambrosias, it's still possible that they can show up at tasting later on. As your wine ages, the flavors will shift, and some that you tasted before may drop off. When this happens, it's possible for one or more of those fallen flavors to show up, if the wine's overall quality is still good enough. This certainly isn't an efficient way to test for more flavors, though.

Mixing for Single Flavors

Sometimes I need to make a lot of wine from a limited amount of grapes (like Raisin for Festival ambrosias). My method for making larger quantities of a specific flavor is pretty basic. I take 10-20 grapes from a Raisin (or whatever) vineyard and combine it in a barrel with a full harvest from one other vineyard. I can then do the same over and over until I run out of Raisin grapes, and chances are I'll end up with that many barrels of wine that'll eventually show Raisin.

By limiting the grapes in the barrel to two specific sources, I'm limiting the chance that extra flavors are going to show up and crash the party. If one set (or more) of the grapes you use has mediocre quality, it's possible that the flavor you want could be diluted to less than full strength or, worse, not show up at all. Use good quality grapes every time, and your chances are pretty good that you're going to get what you need.

Mixing for Multiple Flavors

This really follows the same rules as above, but be aware that if you need full-strength flavors (Like Lemon-Apricot for book 3), it gets tougher and tougher to do. While I've seen mixes of 1 grape : 150 grapes work fine, I'd be lying if I said I was confident that that would work often. Again, if you cap yourself at grapes from two vineyards, you're increasing your chances that the mix will work.

Stacking Flavors in Mixes

This is an idea I've been playing with for some time now. It works, but I've not really had time to do much stress testing.

Let's say you want to make a large quantity of wine with a particular flavor or two. You can sometimes successfully use grapes from three or more vineyards if you overlap the flavors. What I mean is, make sure the vineyards you're using share one or more flavors with the other vineyards you're using. This will cut down on the number of expected flavors in the wine and leave a little room for the incidental ones that can show up. With a little luck (okay, not luck, but behind-the-scenes stuff we can't really see easily), you'll get a larger quantity of the wine with the flavor(s) you want.

Tasting for Points

For reference, when I talk about "scoring" or "points" below, I'm referring to the "new wine experience" message you get each time you're filling in a slot in your wine notebook. Wine is always fun when it's shared with your friends, but the below was written with an eye to filling in your notebooks quickly to gain your permanent perception points.

Your Wine Notebooks

Available at the School of Body at no cost once you've completed the Initiation into Body principle. Accessible by clicking yourself and then "Special".

Currently, it is possible for new folks to pick up more than one notebook at a time; I advise against this. It gets a little confusing, you can mistakenly waste wine if you're not paying attention and it really doesn't save you any running, as you still must run back and show the SBody your old one before starting the next. You're better served picking them up one at a time.

Keep in mind that you'll need to find unique combinations for scoring as noted below; you can't simply drink 28 glasses of any wine and complete the "sampling" category of the Beginner notebook, for example. While you can sometimes score multiple points in a category from drinking several glasses of the same wine, don't expect this to be the norm. These notebooks are meant to be challenging and take time to complete.

Beginner

• 28 glasses of "sampling" wines
• 14 glasses of 12%+ alcohol wines
• 14 glasses of high quality wines
• 7 glasses of wines that are at least 3 vintages old

Enthusiast

• 49 glasses of "sampling" wines
• 14 glasses of sweet wines (in this case, at least 10% RS at time of bottling)
• 14 glasses of wines that are at least 13% alcohol
• 21 glasses of high quality wines
• 12 glasses of wines that are at least 5 vintages old

Oenophile

• 70 glasses of "sampling" wines
• 21 glasses of wines that contain "berry" flavors
• 14 glasses of wines that contain "spice" flavors
• 7 glasses of wines that contain "dried fruit" flavors
• 7 glasses of wines that contain "caramel" flavors
• 7 glasses of wines that contain both Lemon and Apricot (only full strength counts)
• 1 glass of wines that contains both Walnut and Tobacco (only full strength counts)
• 7 glasses of wines that are at least 9 vintages old

Sommalier (should read 'Sommelier')

• 107 glasses of "sampling" wines
• 21 glasses of wines that contain "nut" flavors and "rich dessert" level sweetness (or higher)
• 21 glasses of wines that contain "floral" flavors and "rich dessert" level sweetness (or higher)
• 21 glasses of wines that contain "vegetable" flavors
• 7 glasses of wines that contain Blackberry (full strength), Tea (full strength) and "Caramel" flavors
• 3 glasses of wines that contain "caramel" flavor and are 21+ vintages old and at least 14% alcohol
• 21 glasses of wines that are of "Pharaoh's Cellar" quality
• 21 glasses of wines that are at least 35 vintages old

Try grape juice first!

You can fill in many slots for the "sampling"/"sweetness"/"quality" categories of your wine notebooks by drinking instabottled wines. For the sweetness categories that have no attached flavor requirements, you can just do this with multiple 0v flavor wines and fill those slots quickly.

For the fourth notebook floral/nut categories, the wine must reach "Rich, honeyed dessert wine" or higher sweetness to count. Since there are 0v and 1v nut and flower flavors, if you use a vine like Eigam Bronze, you should be able to fill these in fairly painlessly. If you find that Eigam Bronze doesn't give you enough Quality (shouldn't be an issue, generally), you can try Cali's Favorite instead.

How many "points" can I score per bottle?

It is possible to get multiple points in different categories from one glass of wine, and it is possible to do this multiple times from different glasses of the same bottle. For this reason, if you're drinking to fill in your book quickly, you should drink most of each bottle yourself, and you should use the best wine table possible. The most points I've heard of from a single bottle is 12, reported by oicurtis). As you taste more and more, though, it will get harder to find flavors/flavor combinations that you haven't tried before.

Be sure you've got your tasting table set up well, or you're wasting points!

Track your progress

Scoring wine notebook points seems to be tied directly to the flavor/combination of flavors of the wines you drink and whether you've tasted them before.

Example: You're in your first wine book. You sample two single-flavor wines: Carmelization/Chocolate and Carmelization/Butterscotch. You drink the Chocolate wine first, scoring points from a higher quality glass for "chocolate" and at a lower quality glass for "carmelization". You then drink the Butterscotch wine. You score points at higher quality glass where you tasted "butterscotch", but you score nothing from the "carmelization" you taste at a lesser glass.

For efficient scoring (and preventing wasted glasses of wine), you might consider making a spreadsheet of flavors so you can note combinations you've tasted and what points you received when you did. That way, when you're reaching the end of your notebook, you'll know what flavors/flavor combinations you should try to find...This is an awful lot of tracking, though. And no matter what you do, there seems to be a small hash function involved that can trip you up. Just know that the last few points in any wine notebook can sometimes take you as many bottles to get as filling the whole of the rest of the book did. >.<

Note: your slate of flavors tasted gets wiped clean when you finish a wine notebook, so you should try tasting them all again each time you complete a notebook.

Palate Increases

Palate increases happen occasionally when you're tasting wines. Each increase early on will help you to identify more flavors in the wines you drink (assuming there are some there to be found). Current information suggests that each player's palate is unique. Beyond those first few increases, subsequent ones begin filling adding to the individual's ability to taste specific flavors. This is why some players can taste flavors that others can't, even in the same bottle of wine using the same glass.

You gain palate increases by drinking quality wines. The more wine you drink, the more increases you'll get - especially if it's good quality. The exact levels at which you'll gain aren't known, but it gets progressively harder the more increases you have. Higher quality wines are worth more than lower ones for this; someone with only a few increases can gain several from one bottle of very high quality wine, for example. Someone with many increases will gain much more slowly, and it slows down further if using low quality wines.

This is exactly as it should be. In real life, a person with a very refined palate for wine tasting is not going to be drinking boxed wine in order to increase his abilities, and since he's got a lot of knowledge already, gaining more takes effort. But someone new to wine tasting will learn quickly and might gain a lot of knowledge from a single fine wine.

All of this is completely separated from wine notebooks; they aren't related in any fashion. You do not even have to have a notebook to gain palate increases.

Currently, apart from counting your increases yourself as they happen, there is no way to keep track. If you want to keep track on the wiki, you can add yours here.

Gathering a Little Data

I decided to try and track how much wine (and what quality) it took me to get from one advance to the next, and I succeeded mostly, though I know I probably missed recording a few bottles...going to try and chart it again with my next increase.

If you'd like to help me gather data, please track your own as carefully as possible and notate it here as below (the numbers are how many glasses consumed of each quality - not bottles):

Name	Increase #	Hint	Passable	Graceful	Stunning	Astonishing	Spectacular	Luxury	Stupendous	Historic	Monumental	Grandchildren	Pharaoh's
Calixes	58	133	49	91	155	315	577	389	286	49	21	0	0
Calixes	59	35	21	84	140	259	224	262	56	0	7	100	0
Calixes	60	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	160	0
Calixes	61	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	163	0
Calixes	62	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	166	0

Links!

• Vine Stat Averages - NEW! (Jan 08) This page shows some averages for many of my vines and some others as well. It'll give you an idea of what each vine will do. Work in progress.
  
• Hybrid Vines - the main wiki page for vine crossbreeds, though it's terribly out of date and incomplete. You might be better served asking others for recommendations.
  
• Flavors - Egypt's currently known wine flavors. I love that this list is still growing more than a year into the telling! Please add your own if you find new ones.
  
• RL Wine Flavors - non-wiki site with information about RL wine flavor mapping that closely matches ours.
  
• Palate Increases - a page where you can track your palate increases, since we don't currently have means inside the game.
  

Comments, Questions, Theories, Ideas, Suggestions, Etc.

Please, if you have anything to ask/say about this page or about viticulture, say it below. I can be tough to reach in game, and if you intersperse comments in the text, they'll be harder to find.

And if you see a question here that you know the answer to, please don't hesitate to answer it. No one likes to wait. XD

Very interesting stuff on palate increases. I suspect this is true, except that I am starting to think there is not a linear increase in points needed to reach the next palate level, but more of an exponential increase, such as 7, 21, 49, 105, etc etc. (The pattern in this is example is is (palate level * 7) + (number of points previously earned)) [~Isetnefret?]

yaya, i think you're right about that. there's a line somewhere in the middle of that mess to that effect. the numbers i used were *purely* an example pulled out of nowhere, since i really have no clue what they'd be. XD ~Cali

Always a pleasure to read your notes on wine, Calixes! A couple comments -

• Shelyak was the one suggesting height affected output flavors, I haven't really tested that.
• If you're trying to build up a stock of different flavors, I'd much recommend a line over a grid, although admittedly tending is less fun.
• On quality - I made a wine using 7 grapes from 201 different vineyards, average quality was 70. Straight sum of the qualities was just shy of 14,000. The output quality of the wine at 2 vintages old was only historic though. Maybe only the grapes whose flavors you taste figure into the output quality.
• Although I haven't tried to quantify my palate upgrades in any way, your theory seems to agree with my general experience. I wonder if "Palate Points" for higher quality wines increase faster than linearly. I'm not sure what the sum of all my drinks is, very conservatively, 1500, and I have 9 total palate increases. I haven't focused on quality, many of my wines are only in the 40-50 range.

~Matk

ack! sorry, Matk. i could have sworn i read in your pages something about Shelyak's elevation idea. seems i'm always misquoting you. >.<
your notes on quality are interesting...this is definitely an area where my knowledge is more circumstantial than scientific - i see numbers and run.

it would be nice if someone more mathy than myself wanted to look at the numbers on quality and try and figure it out - definitely not my strength...if you're that person, chat me. =D ~Cali

Acknowledgments

This list of contributors to this stockpile of information just keeps getting longer as the telling progresses...In no particular order: Shelyak, Eigam, Matk, Isetnefret, Calen, Telanoc, Cravat, EldradUlthran, Sumtet, Dakiara, Shebi...I know there are more. My sincere apologies if I've left you off. I've a terrible memory.

A fair bit of my information comes from having discussions with these people, along with many others in game and in the forums. Everyone who has spoken up here, in game, or in the forums has contributed. I've certainly gained as much information from people who have turned out to be wrong as I have from people who've turned out to be right. Nicely done, folks. It's a pleasure working with you.