While serviceable on a simple scale, this page is terribly out of date and contains a lot of duplicate data from the Viticulture guide (which is also out of date). Until such time as these are merged and/or updated, I refer you to my own page here, which is up to date as of February 2008. ~Calixes
The Art of Wine Making
- First you will need to grow grapes through Viticulture.
- Next you will need to build a wine barrel to place your grapes in. Wine Barrels are built inside a compound and take 1 Small Barrels (made using a Barrel Vice), 50 Nails and 6 Boards.
- When placing your grapes in a barrel you will need one Barrel Tap (made with Carving skill, level 3) before you can seal your grapes to start fermentation.
- It takes 21 Grapes to produce one bottle of wine. Might keep that number in mind when loading your barrel with grapes (so 42 grapes will produce 2 bottles etc). I am not sure if there is maximum amount of grapes in a barrel (if anyone has this info, please note).
I have a 462 grape barrel - Xirxx
I have a 1192 grape barrel - MecFiGerth
I have a barrel with 5.7k+...if there's a cap, I haven't seen it, but I'm trying. ;) ~Calixes
- Leave your grapes fermenting for as long or as short a time as you like. The fermentation time period will help to develop flavors in your wine as well as adding alchohol (this comes from residual sugar) and tannin.
This implies that certain flavors show up only in wines with a certain alcohol percentage. Is there truth to this? -Isetnefret
Wine Barrel
- Once you have sealed your barrel, you are then able to Siphon a Barrel Sample. This allows for you to gain some statistics on your current batch. The following information will be available to you:
- Vintage (based on current month in game) Note that this is the vintage you would get if you bottled the wine that instant - the wine's permanent vintage isn't set until bottling. If the game month changes while the wine is in the barrel, the wine's vintage will as well.
- Wine color (i.e. white wine, red wine, etc.)
- Alcohol (Seems to be produced at a rate proportional to initial sugar)
- Residual Sugar (Begins with 1% for every 2 grape sugar and decreases 1% for every 2% alcohol increases)
- Tannin (Seems to be produced at a rate proportional to grape skin times grape color)
- Acid (Seems to be constant at the grape acid divided by ten)
Example:
- Final Stats on my Distraction grapes were: Acid 0, Color 6, Quality 16, Skin 25, Sugar 23 (please note, these are NO acid grapes).
- When 63 grapes were placed in the barrel my stats were: White Wine, 0.0 Alcohol, 11.5 Residual Sugar, 0.0 Tanin, 0.0 Acid.
- Approx 26 hours later my stats were: White Wine, 1.7 Alcohol, 10.6 Residual Sugar, 0.1 Tanin, 0.0 Acid.
- So based on the above information, you can rely on your grape sugar numbers being cut in half when barreled and converted to residual sugar. (Note:The grape sugar to ending alcohol level is 1:1 because residual sugar produces double its amount in alcohol unless theres an alcohol cap ~Setheri)
- It is important for a novice to note that while your RS level may be really high, conversion to alcohol slows down dramatically over time...Even if there's no hard cap in place, the alcohol level is effectively capped by how long it's practical to leave it in the barrel. I'm told 14% would take a couple or three RL months.
Bottling Wine
When you are ready to bottle your wine, make sure you have some empty wine bottles. They are created using a Glazier's Bench.
Once your wine is bottled, you can drink at any point. It is important to consider that wines develop flavor within their bottles over time.
Some wine flavors take several vintages (game months) to develop. If you've got several bottles of a wine that are 'Thin', stow them in a chest for a game month or three and then taste them again. It is possible that they had flavors too subtle to be sensed when the wine was younger. There is also a chance that the wine's quality will have improved during this time.
A wine's flavor seems to be related directly to the location of the vineyard(s) that grew the grapes. Over time, your bottled wines may produce new secondary flavors that seem to come from flavor grids nearby the vineyard(s). (It seems that a palate increase is necessary to sense most of these secondary flavors.) ~Calixes
Drinking Wine
- Why drink wine? Simple! For the pleasure of it. For the social interaction. To help vintners make the best use of their products, as each person may (usually) only gain bonuses from a single glass, and each bottle makes seven. Lastly, to help with future research: Be attentive when reporting what flavors you get and when, and you may advance the entire cryptic science of both wine making and wine tasting! For an activity that gets you potential permanent Perception points, this isn't a bad deal at all.
- You will need a wine tasting table (created using oyster shell marble) and wine glasses (also made with a Glazier's Bench).
- You can drink wine straight from the bottle under Skills -> Consume menu, although this is somewhat wasteful.
- Opening a bottle at a wine tasting table allots seven glasses for tasting.
- Broke open some wine and one bottle produced two different tastes. 4 people at the table tasted peach, while two tasted tree fruit. This is similar to the way wine flavors were tasted in Tale1. http://wiki.atitd.net/tale1?action=browse&id=Winetasting&oldid=Wine_Tasting -Bart
- I have a feeling the people who tasted fruit were using a high enough quality glass while the others were not. I am nearly 100% sure that glass quality affects whether you can taste 2nd tier flavors (i.e. grapefruit insead of fruity) - Xirxx
- I tend to agree. Off the top of my head, our wine glasses varied between 6200 and 6500. But since we got two tastes on one bottle, and one taste on other bottles using the same glasses, im thinking that it may not be as simple as a set number (such as "you can taste tier two flavors at 6500q wine glasses)
- Would you get two points from the same wine if you were to drink from a lower quality glass and taste "fruity" and then drink from a high quality glass and drink "peach", or is it limited to one point per wine, despite the glass? (Asking about wine glasses, is it to your advantage to have low quality ones, or should you go for the high quality and forget the low?) ~Daru
- I have heard this being done. 3 points using a low quality, a medium quality and a high quality. Though have not been able to confirm this myself. -Bart
- I can confirm this, though as we weren't sure how the glasses on the table were set up, we didn't know what quality glasses we were drinking of. But a wine I opened gave the following tastes: Fruit (low quality?), Citrus Notes (med quality? ~6398), Grapefruit (q9000+?). I scored two points for 12%+ alcohol and three points each for the 14 high quality wines and the 28 tasted wines. —AatonPulonich
Glass quality absolutely affects flavors tasted, and therefore "points" scored. The glasses on my table are set up such that there's no glass at one end and a range of 1k to 9k quality glasses running sequentially to the other end. Tasters consistently get only the simplest flavor(s) where there is no glass or a low quality one, mid-range flavor(s) at the middle quality glasses, and complex flavor(s) at the high end.
Additionally, I can confirm what AatonPulonich said; it is possible to get multiple points in different categories of your wine book from one drink, and it is possible to do this several times from the same wine with the aid of different quality glasses. This seems to be tied to the combination of flavors at each glass. If you're tasting a new flavor (or new combination of flavors), you're likely to get points.
There also seems to be some slightly random or avatar-dependent aspect to tasting, because two avatars with equivalent palates may not get the same flavors at the same glass, though flavor complexity seems to stay the same within a given quality range of glass ("Fruit" will consistently be tasted at no or low quality glasses even if not at the exact same one).
And just to confirm for anyone unsure, the wine books do not seem to be tied to palate increases. The increases seem to be random. I got my first before finishing my first book, and I got two more shortly after. A guildmate got two very close together.
I'm working on putting this (and more) into a tidier format here.~Calixes
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