User:Rabble/wines

So you want to be an ATiTD wine maker? No. Stop. Don't do it. Go away. It will drive you nuts.

Still here? Well let me share what little I know.

Wine making starts with the Viticulture technology. Any level 5+ player can learn it at any UWorship where it's been unlocked. Once you learn the skill, you'll be able to use vine cuttings, build vineyards, wine barrels and ceremonial tasting tables. All of these are necessary for making and drinking wines. You'll also need barrel taps to seal the wine in wine barrels and that requires at least carving 3 and an iron knife -- or you can trade for barrel taps.

Getting a Vine Cutting

The first thing you'll need is a vine cutting and there are two ways to get cuttings. The best way is to ask around. Veteran winemakers usually have lots of cuttings and give them away for free. Sometimes they even setup public warehouses and vineyards where you can get cuttings for yourself. They can also recommend the best types of cuttings for wine or chemistry.

The second method is to take a deben of tilipia meat to a UWorship which has unlocked viticulture. Hand over the tilipia and you might get a vine cutting in return. It all depends on whether anyone else has received a cutting in the last hour from that university. If someone else recently received a cutting, you'll just get a message to come back later.

Each UWorship gives out a different randomly selected type of cutting. At the beginning of tale, it's best to make wines with the Balance type cutting. If that's not available, use any of the others but switch to Balance once it shows up. After crossbreeding is unlocked there will be even better vine types to use. It's why it's best to skip the UWorships altogether and just ask another player for cuttings.

Planting and Reproducing Cuttings

Now that you have a shiny new cutting, head back to your camp and build several vineyards near your CP. I recommend building a row of five or six vineyards.

Click on one of the vineyards and choose "Plant" and select your cutting. Click on the vineyard again and you'll see a detailed set of choices. Don't try any of them yet. Instead just find the "Take a Cutting of the Vine" choice. You can take a vine cutting every two RL hours. Taking a cutting does not hurt the growing vine or change any of the stats. It just gives you a new, free cutting.

Wait two hours after you planted your first cutting and click on the vineyard to get a new cutting. Plant that one.

Then wait another two hours and take cuttings from both of the vineyards. Plant those cuttings. In this manner, you can double the number of cuttings every two hours.

Tending Vines Until You Drop

If you click on a vineyard with a growing vine, you'll see a detailed box with a lot of information. Near the top is a single line describing the current vine status. The possibilities are "Vines are sagging a bit", "Leaves are wilting". "A musty smell can be detected", "Stems look especially fat", "Leaves rustle in the breeze", "Grapes are starting to shrivel", or "Leaves shimmer with moisture".

Below the status line are several numbers showing the grape stats. They are Acid, Color, Grapes, Quality, Skin, Sugar and Vigor.

And below the stats are different tending choices such as "Tend: Aerate the Soil".

Every combination of vine status and tending method change the grape stats by fixed amounts. For example, if a vineyard in T6 is growing Balance and showing "Leaves are wilting", then choosing "Tend: Aerate the Soil" will always change acid by +6, color by +5, grapes by +7, quality by -5, skin by +8, sugar by 0, and vigor by -14. Choosing "Tend: Mist the Grapes" will change the grape stats in a different way.

Figuring out the tend tables is beyond the scope of this guide. Veteran winemakers do it every tale and post the tables to the wiki. Sometimes they even recommend specific tending methods. But your job as a vine grower is to pick a tending method that increases the number of grapes on the vine and also changes the grape stats that are most important to you. You can find tending tables for vine cuttings on the wiki.

As a winemaker, I strongly recommend choosing tending methods that increase grape count while also raising sugar and quality. Acid, color and skin are not very important for drinking wines. Note that each time you tend the grapes, it will decrease the vigor of the cutting. If the vigor gets to zero, the grapes die. So it's very important to choose tending methods which lower vigor as little as possible. This usually leaves you with a small dilemma as you have to pick tending methods that decrease vigor very little, increase grape count as much as possible and also boost quality and sugar. It's usually not possible to do all four with each tending. You'll have to compromise at times.

Once you work out your preferred tending methods, you can tend a vineyard every RL hour. It doesn't hurt to wait longer. You can leave a vineyard untended for a year and it will stay in the same condition. The grape stats won't change until you tend the vine.

I suggest tending a vine until the vigor is so low that the next tending will kill it. Then it's time to "harvest the grapes" and plant a new cutting. Using a macro program like veggietales helps a lot with tendings as they can become very boring after a while. But don't harvest grapes until you read the next section.

As you grow grapes in multiple vineyards, you might notice that each vineyard goes through a predetermined sequence of vine states. For example, if a particular vineyard starts with "The grapes are sagging" then every vine cutting you plant there will also start with "The grapes are sagging". If the first tend changes the grapes to "The leaves are wilting" then that will always be the second status of vines planted at that specific vineyard. It doesn't matter how many times you plant vines there or how often you tend them or when you plant them or who tends or plants them. The game predetermines the vine status sequence at the time the vineyard is built.

This can cause a problem in the long run as many winemakers eventually settle on one vine cutting they like best. If you grow grapes at a specific vineyard and wind up with poor quality grapes, then growing more grapes there will also produce poor quality grapes. But if you tear down the vineyard and build a new one at the same spot, the game will assign the new vineyard a different tending sequence. This gives you the chance for better grapes.

Grapes, Barrels and Barrel Taps. Lot's of 'em

Now that you are ready to harvest grapes, it's important to start a record keeping process. The harvested grapes show up in your inventory with your name and a number after it. The first time I harvested grapes in T6, they were labelled Rabble#1 and the second time they were labelled Rabble#2, etc. The game does not record the stats of the grapes or the location where you grew them or the type of vine cutting you used.

I suggest setting up a spreadsheet to track all that information. If you tend and harvest grapes with veggietales, it will also record some of the data for you. But I still recommend more detailed notes in a spreadsheet, word processor or some other database. All serious wine makers need good notes!. I recommend recording the location, number of grapes, and grape label each time you harvest grapes.

Once harvested, the grapes will only last one day in your inventory. After 24 teppy hours, the grapes will sour. You won't know that until you try to use them. So it's important to hustle those grapes over to a wine barrel, click on the barrel and add the grapes. You can add as many grapes as you want to a single barrel but you'll need at least 21 bunches of grapes to make a single bottle of wine. Single vineyards usually produce 80 to 140 bunches of grapes. Some hybrid vine cuttings can produce more.

The game tracks every batch of grapes you add to the barrel and how long it's been since you harvested those grapes. If any of those grapes are over 24 teppy hours old, you won't be able to seal the barrel. You'll get a message that the grapes have spoiled and you'll have to empty the content and loose all of the grapes.

This means it's important to harvest grapes only when you have barrels setup and available to use. You'll also need a Barrel Tap to seal the barrel. You can make these yourself if you have carving 3 and at least an iron knife. Some players hate making small barrels or barrel taps and just trade for them or join guilds with barrels and taps available.

Once you have barrel space, barrel taps and a system to record the grape stats, then go back to your vineyards that are ready to harvest and pluck those grapes.

Take the grapes back to an empty barrel, click on the barrel, and chose "Add Grapes...". The game will show you a list of all the grapes that are in your inventory. As noted, you can mix and match grapes in any one barrel. But I strongly recommend you initially only add one batch of grapes to one barrel.

When you are done adding grapes to a specific barrel, click on the barrel again and choose "Crush the Grapes and Seal the Barrel". You'll need a barrel tap in your inventory for this step. When you seal the barrel, the game asks you to name the wine and provides a default name. Replace this name with something more meaningful such as the location of the vineyard.

Aging wines in a barrel (alcohol and tannin)

Once a barrel is sealed, the grapes will start to ferment and produce wine. You can click on the barrel at any time and choose "Siphon a Barrel Sample". You'll see the current stats of the wine. They are Alcohol, Residual Sugar, Tannin and Acid. You can siphon a barrel sample as often as you want. It doesn't change or decrease the amount of wine in the barrel.

Initially, the alcohol will be zero but will rapidly increase as Residual Sugar turns into alcohol. Each 0.1% of Residual Sugar will turn into 0.2% alcohol. The rate slows as the wine ages and as the amount of residual sugar drops. But the maximum alcohol level is limited to the starting residual sugar. If the wine started with residual sugar of 3.0 then it will max out at 6.0% alcohol.

Tannin starts at zero and slowly increases based on the skin and color stats of the grapes used to make the wine.

Wines are made for a variety of purposes. If you are making wines for chemistry, you'll need very high tannin or alcohol levels in order to produce lots of spirits. Some wines needed for tests also require a specific alcohol level. But most of the wines needed to fill wine tasting notebooks can be any alcohol level. This means you can harvest grapes and take them to a barrel, seal the barrel, and then immediately click on the barrel and choose "Open the Barrel and Bottle the Wine". You'll need one empty wine barrel for every 21 bunches of grapes in the barrel.

Once the wine is bottled, you can't rename it. It shows up in your inventory with the label that was on the wine in the barrel. When you are ready to bottle the wines, I suggest you first siphon a sample, then use the information from the siphon to re-label the wine. The new label can include the vineyard data, alcohol level and any other information you want to include in the wine label. Good wine labels are very important when it comes to filling wine tasting notebooks! There is more information on this later on.

Re-labeling wine in the barrel requires one papyrus paper and one ink per re-label. You'll also need a single quill to make the new label but the quill is reusable.

Aging wines in a bottle (understanding flavors and vintages)

Once you bottle a wine, the alcohol, acid, and tannin levels never change. They are frozen at the moment of bottling.

What does change after you bottle a wine is the vintage and the flavor.

Each tale starts with vintage 0 and changes one vintage each game month. Year 1, Ahket I is vintage 0. Year 1, Ahket II is vintage 1. And so forth. Each game month takes about 10 days in real life. You can find the current vintage by clicking on yourself, then skills, viticulture, current vintage.

The flavors in a wine depend on the location and the vintage. Every spot in the map has up to 3 different flavors. Wines made from grapes from a certain vineyard will never have more than 3 flavors in them. This is true even if you tear down the vineyard and rebuild it since the flavors are dependent on the location of the vineyard.

The flavor spots do not coincide exactly with the in-game coordinate system. This means wines from a certain vineyard might give you 3 distinct flavors while wines from a second vineyard adjacent to the first might give you 3 different flavors.

Most flavor spots are a few coordinates square but flavors reoccur quite frequently. If you find that wines at one spot have the Cherry flavor and wines from a spot 10 coordinates away also have Cherry, you did not find one large Cherry spot. Instead, you found two separate but nearby Cherry spots. You can confirm this by building a row of vineyard in between the two spots and making wines from each vineyard.

Here is a full listing of all the known flavors: http://www.atitd.org/wiki/tale6/Wine/Flavors If you look at the table, you'll notice that *many* flavors are missing. Each tale has a slightly different set of discovered flavors and we never find all of them in any one tale.

Let's look at a section of the table to understand it better:

Taste Category (Tier 1)	Primary Tastes (Tier 2)	Secondary Tastes (Tier 3)	Vintage
Earthyness	Earthyness	Mushrooms	1
		Dust	4
	Moldyness	Mildew	14
		Moldy Cork	?

Each distinct flavor actually has 3 different descriptions. In the above table, "Earthyness", "Moldyness", and "Mildew" are all the same exact flavor. If you drink a Mildew flavored wine, you'll only see one of those descriptions and it's based mostly on the quality of the glass you used to drink the wine. This means if you drink a Mildew wine using a 9000 quality glass, you'll probably see the Mildew flavor. But if you drink the same wine using a 6000 quality glass, you'll likely only see the Moldyness flavor. Finally, if you drink the same wine using a 1 quality glass (or no glass at all) then you'll only see Earthyness.

This is a very important distinction. Some of the wine tasting notebooks require certain flavors, such as Mint or Cherry or Tea.