Quick and Easy Guide to Making Wine
Okay, so you don't care about the inner workings of viticulture, and you don't want a big fuss. You just want to make a little wine to drink with your friends. It's a lot of information no matter how I try to cut it down, but I'll do my best to keep this brief. Here's what you need to do:
- Get the right supplies.
- Build some vineyards.
- Grow some grapes.
- Harvest grapes and dump into wine barrels (grapes become wine at this point).
- Age the wine in the barrel to develop alcohol/tannin.
- Bottle the wine.
- Age the wine in the bottle to develop flavors.
- Drink!
This process can take days or months, and it's highly addictive. =)
Gather Materials
You'll need:
That's pretty much it, apart from finding a suitably-equipped ceremonial tasting table to use for drinking.
Build Some Vineyards
There's no pattern to where you can find each
wine flavor. It's random, and they repeat. If you want a specific flavor, you're going to have to ask around or check any
flavor maps you can find on the wiki.
If you're not after a particular flavor, it's much easier.
- Choose a place you run around a lot - near your camp is usually good.
- Build as many vineyards as you like, placing each about 8 coordinates apart. You can do this in a line, in a grid, or in a combination. Building along a path you frequently follow is a good idea...You'll tend more often.
- Do NOT build a bunch of vineyards all together in a cluster.
Grow (Tend) Grapes
If you're using Eigam Copper as recommended above, you can see what each type of tend will do on
this table. It may look a little confusing, but it will quickly make sense if you try it. Look at the table while you're looking at a vineyard you want to tend, and that will help.
If you use a different vine, ask around until you locate the table with its tend data.
- You can tend your vines once per hour.
- Do NOT reduce grape total to zero. The vine will die.
- Do NOT reduce vine vigor to zero. The vine will die.
- You can take a cutting of the vine once every two hours. Do this every chance you get, and you'll quickly build up a supply of that vine.
- There is no penalty for leaving your grapes untended for long periods of time. Nothing changes. Tend as often or as little as you like.
If you're just interested in making some general wine for drinking, when tending, I suggest aiming for 15+ Acid, 50+ Sugar, and Grapes/Quality as high as you can get them.
I've recently added some average production values for a lot of vines http://perl.atitd.wiki/wiki/tale3/Users/Calixes/Calixes'_Crossbreeds/Vines/Tends_By_Phenotype . You can look at the various averages and kind of get an idea of what different vines can do. There's more of an explanation at the top of that page.
Harvest Your Grapes
Once the vigor of your vine has reached close to zero, harvest the grapes. Harvesting kills the vine. I always replace it right away with a new cutting so I can start the process all over again immediately.
Grapes spoil! You've got maybe a couple of days RL once you take them off the vine, so don't harvest them until you're ready to use them.
Barrel Your Grapes
Take the grapes back to camp, and toss them into a barrel.
- One bottle of wine = 21 grapes.
- You can put as many grapes as you want in a barrel.
- You can put grapes from different vineyards in the barrel together to create mixes.
- Once you've added all the grapes you want to add, use a barrel tap to seal the barrel.
You have the option to name your wine as you like when you push the button to seal the barrel, but do not use the "/" character. It's a character reserved for other purposes in the game, and using it in wine labels messes things up.
If you know what flavors are in the grapes you used, or if you've assigned some sort of codes to uniquely identify your vineyards, it is helpful to use this information in the wine name for easy reference later. It's also a good idea to include any other stats you're sure about. For example, if you know up front that you're going to age the wine in the barrel until it has hit 12% alcohol, then you could include that in the name. It helps, since there is no other way to tell alcohol percentage once the wine has been taken from the barrel.
Age Your Wine in the Barrel
In the barrel, the sugar in your grapes turns into alcohol, and tannin develops. This is not immediate. It can take a day up to a few months, depending.
- 10% alcohol (required for Ra Festival) can happen in 24 hours, but it can take days longer with low grape sugar.
- 12% alcohol (needed for Thoth Festival and first wine notebook) takes about a week.
- 13% alcohol (needed for second wine notebook) takes about a month.
- 14% alcohol (needed in the fourth notebook) takes about three months, but there may not be enough time left in the telling for you to make wine for this one yourself. You can ask me (Calixes) or another vintner if you need wine for this requirement.
These times are RL lengths of time - not game time.
If you're just making wines for general drinking, alcohol and tannin aren't really important. You could put your grapes into the barrel, close it up, and immediately bottle the wine if you wanted. Keep in mind that a couple of the wine notebooks have alcohol categories (12% or 13%), though, so you want to make a little bit of those wines.
- Tannin
- If you need tannin for Banquet wine or for wines used to make spirits, how much tannin you get depends on the stats of your grapes and how long you leave the wine in the barrel. This is generally not a fast process, and you should probably look into the other wine guides for advice on a specialized vine cutting and/or more information.
- Alcohol
- If you need a specific alcohol level for Banquet, the Test of Festivals, or for the wine tasting notebooks, then you'll need to watch your barrel over the coming days/weeks/months (yes, it really can take that long).
Use the "Siphon a Barrel Sample" option on the barrel at any time you like to see how the alcohol level/tannin level is progressing.
A high sugar stat in your grapes can speed up the alcohol production a little at the beginning. If you only want 10% alcohol, try to make sure your grape sugar is at least 100 when you harvest your grapes, and you can get to 10% in a day. This isn't hard to do with Eigam Copper or Cali's Favorite.
Bottle Your Wine
When your wine has all the alcohol/tannin you need, press the "Open the Barrel and Bottle the Wine" option while holding enough wine bottles. Now it's time to age the wine so flavors will show up.
Age Your Wine in the Bottle and Drink!
You're going to want some flavors after all that work, right? It's not over just yet.
Wine flavors depend on three major things:
- Where the grapes used were grown
- How long (how many "vintages") you age the wine in the bottle (time in the barrel doesn't count here)
- The quality of the wine glass you use to taste the wine (I'm not going to cover this further in this guide, but make sure you use a table that has at least a 3k glass, a 6k glass, and a 9k glass when tasting!)
Some Information on Vintages
- A "vintage" is equivalent to one game month. This changes roughly every ten RL days at 12 am on the first day of each new game month.
- When someone asks about the "current vintage," that refers to how many game months have passed since the start of the telling. (At this writing, it is currently Vintage 46 in Egypt.) You can find out the "current vintage" either by siphoning a taste from a barrel currently holding grapes or by asking someone who can.
- At each turn of the "current vintage," changes will happen in your bottled wines - sometimes in quality, sometimes by new flavors showing up. This is complex; you can find more information, but it's enough to know that the wine will change.
- Your wine is assigned a vintage when it comes out of the barrel (whatever vintage it happens to be in Egypt at that time).
- The number of "vintages" that have passed since you put your wine into bottles is what we call the wine's age. You can measure the age of your wine by subtracting its assigned vintage (it's automatically part of the wine's name) from the "current vintage" in Egypt. Example: A wine that I bottled during the "current vintage" number 40..."Vintage 40" is part of that wine's name. I can tell that it is six vintages old because I know the "current vintage" is now 46.
- Aging
- Flavors don't all show up at once. Some flavors can be tasted right away. Some flavors won't show up for months, and there's nothing you can do to speed that up. See the known flavor chart for information on which flavors can show up at what age.
- Vineyard Location
- Every vineyard should produce three flavors (and sometimes more). These flavors will not change...Meaning, if a particular vineyard has Grapefruit, Apple, and Skunk, it will *always* produce those same flavors. A wine made with grapes from a single vineyard will not show more than three flavors at a time, though. A wine made with grapes from two or more vineyards can have up to seven flavors at a time. No matter how many vineyards' grapes you put together in a barrel, you can only taste seven at a time, and it'll be the strongest seven flavors.
That's It?
Of course there's a lot more information to be had, if you want it. Much more detail. You can see my larger
wine guide if you want more information, or you can look at the main wiki's
Viticulture guide]. There's also information floating around out there on other user's pages and in the
aTitD forum. There's also
vine genetics, information on existing
vine hybrids and making
spirits. You can even [track your palate increases]
?.
Use this guide to get started, but don't hesitate to dig in further. It's fun.
Happy wine-making!
~Calixes =D