The Vision:
A line of 100 vineyards, one every 10 coordinates stretching 1000 coordinates north-south.
Results
- Detected flavors here. Grass never seen before, Rose, Coffee, Artichoke new to me.
- Never saw flavors in more than 3 consecutive vineyards.
Inspiration
Initially deluded by the 64x64 coordinate grid theory, I placed my vineyards well apart from each other, making tending quite time consuming. I wanted to test more spots in less time. I also wanted to try to put the 64x64 coordinate grid theory down in a clear and scientific way. So I decided I'd build a 10x10 grid of vineyards 10 coordinates apart in each direction.
But from the data I was seeing on the web, that might not be covering enough ground. I didn't have a good idea what size the flavor blobs were. And if I got unlucky and ended up just sampling 1 or 2 large flavor blobs I would have wasted a lot of resources. So I decided to do a line instead of a grid, so I would cover more ground and hopefully detect more flavors. With 100 vineyards in a line I will hopefully be able to say something about the size of flavor blobs and perhaps the rarity of flavors. And placing the vineyards in a line will simplify tending as well.
Plan
The 100 vineyards will cost 4000 boards, 1200 rope, and 2500 nails. I'll also need about 200 barrel taps and 1000ish empty wine bottles. As I build, I'll plant Eigam Copper for good grape count and quality. My current wine tests suffer from low quality grapes in many cases. I'd like to have consistently high quality grapes with as many grapes per harvest as possible. I'd like to be able to test the wines each vintage for at least 9 vintages, but given the typical number of grapes per harvest with Eigam Copper, I'll need to run at least two harvests (at about 17 tends per harvest). I want to do this instead of making additional vineyards because of both the doubled cost of materials and the possibility that the vineyards might have different flavors even if they're side by side. To verify consistency of the different harvests, I'll sample extra wine from those harvests that happen to produce more grapes to ensure they are identical to the flavors produced by earlier harvests. All wines will be bottles within a single vintage to simplify analysis. All wines will be insta-bottled - this is simply for flavor testing. Once I've detected new flavors, if any, I can make some high alcohol wine, but that goes beyond the scope of the project.
Tending all those vines takes a long time! And because of the randomness of the tends, I have a few vineyards that don't have enough grapes for even two bottles after 12 tends. Perhaps I should have used Eigam Iron. At any rate, I'm going to shoot for 4 bottles, and test at 0, 2, 9, and 12 vintages old. I pick those vintages because (0) I want to see some preliminary results immediately, (2) by two vintages old, many flavors are present, (9) all known flavors added by 9 old, plus it's in the 3rd wine book, and (12) all flavors present by 12 vintages old (well, maybe, who knows what evil Teppy's hidden away).
Done tending. picking, crushing, and bottling. Less than 24 hrs until the next vintage, so I'm going to wait and sample then.
Placed 32 more vineyards. Mostly looking for lemon. No lemon, but found Raspberry.
What will I find out?
- Some idea of the size of flavor blobs (whether they are truly blobs or some more complicated function doesn't matter, the goal is to get a rough idea of how far apart you should space vineyards to get different flavors)
- Some statistics about the frequency of various flavors
- Possibly detect heretofore unknown flavors!
There'll also be the side benefit of detecting additional flavor that _I_ don't currently have access to, which will be nice for tasting, banquet and festivals.
Updates
- Jul 16: Placed 32 more vineyards, looking for lemon. No lemon, but found Raspberry.
- Jan 3, 2007: Have tasted twice now. The most exciting at 1 vintage old was a Grass/Rose wine. At 3 vintages old picked up Artichoke and Coffee - new flavors we didn't have access to before.
- Dec 3: The line has been bottled! Gonna do my first tasting tomorrow.
- Nov 30: 15 tends done! 96/100 of the vineyards will have enough grapes for 4 bottles after the next tending. A couple will have as many as 6 bottles worth. Two of the remaining vineyards will take one more tend, and the last two may be a bit difficult, but worst case I should have enough for 3 bottles from them even. I think I'll probably bottle Friday or Saturday and do the first taste sometime this weekend!
- Nov 21: Examined the preferred tends for Eigam Copper and changed two of them. Decided to delete a couple goals of the study - finding out the outcome of optimal tending for Eigam Copper was dropped. Since I changed the "optimal" tends mid-way through, I can't say I am testing their output. Also looking at the average vigor lost and the top current vigor after 11 tends, it would take perhaps 40 tends to "finish" every vineyard. To heck with that! I'm now shooting for enough grapes for 4 bottles from each vineyard. I may need to tweak some of the tendings of some of the poorer vineyards to maximize grape output. Another goal was going to be to find the evolution of flavor vintage-by-vintage. But because I'm reducing the number of target grapes, I won't have data for each vintage. At any rate, good progress is being made, maybe 10 more tends and I'll be socking away the bottles. Given the 3rd wine book, I may try another string of vineyards to see if I can find more flavors. Exact configuration will depend on what I find out with this project.
- Nov 20: Couple things happened recently that made me want to change the plan. Firstly, tested over 50 wines from that were at 4 vintages old and found only 2 differences between 2 vintages old and 4 out of 50 wines. I don't think there's a real need to test every vintage. And second of all, the tending is very time consuming and rather un-fun. Even after 10 tends, I don't have enough for 4 bottles of wine for most vineyards. I'll see what I can get, but maybe 0, 2, 9, and 12 vintages old would be acceptable.
- Nov 16: Takes 20 min to tend all the vineyards. Up to 8 tends now, maybe half done on the first batch. Unless I make titanic progress this weekend, I may wait until next vintage to harvest and start the next batch. And getting close to the point where going to have to be a bit careful about tending lest I run out of vigor. That'll slow it down a bit.
- Nov 12: Vineyards up! They stretch from 702,4600 south to 702,3610. I'll be compiling stats on the grapes and wine and numbering them T00-T99, starting with the northenmost vineyard. All are built on sand. There isn't much of a difference in elevation, maybe I can look into that next time around.
- Nov 10, 2006: Have gathered about 80% of the raw materials for the vineyards, they'll go up soon.
Comments
Awesome large-scale project! Based on Calixes' map of her 16x16 grid, I think a line is totally the way to go. If I were you, I'd try to choose a direction that crosses some altitude gradients. I don't have a formal hypothesis yet, but so far my higher-altitude vineyards seem to have more/better flavors than my lowlands vineyards. ~Shelyak
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