Wine Flavors

This page describes the theory of wine flavors. It is a work in Progress, and some of the ideas here have not been thoroughly tested, so be free to add comments if you have something to add, or your own data do not match the theories on this page.

What is a Flavor?

A bottle of wine contains up to 7 flavors that may be detected when tasting the wine. Whether or not you are able to detect a flavor depends on the intensity of the flavor in the wine and of the wines age. Each flavor has a certain vintage the wine must obtain before the flavor shows. A wine may lose some of its flavors as it age, if alcohol or acid levels are not high enough, but the original flavors are still there even if they cannot be detected when drinking. This means they can still be used for other purposes where the hidden flavor is required.

Flavors originate from the soil where the vinyard is located, and a single vinyard may contain up to 3 flavors. To get more flavors in the wine, grapes from different vinyards must be blended in the barrel. The way flavors are distributed in the soil is as of yet unknown, but the theory so far is there is a flavor strength for each flavor which fluctuates up and down throughout Egypt, and only the flavors with the highest flavor strength gets in the vines.

Flavor Strength

The flavor strength is the level of flavor in the soil, which is carried over to the grapes and eventually the wine. What happens to the flavor strength when grapes are mixed is unknown. Flavor strength is location dependent.

Aging affects the relative strengths of flavors. It is believed each flavor has an ideal age at which it is at max, and the further it is from that age the weaker it becomes.

How to get the flavors

Most flavor spots are very small, around 5x5 coords wide. To get all flavors in an area, you should build vineyards 2 coords apart and test each vineyard individually. There are other approaches that will work as well, with larger gaps between vineyards, but you will not catch all the flavors then, and there is no real benefit it is assumed of spreading over a wider area. The distribution of flavors is not well known at this point, but it seems there is a lot of randomness involved. Flavors are not tied to specific regions.

Flavor Intensity

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. Each flavor is in a distinct category. The category reflects the intensity of the flavor.

Intensity is determined partially by the relative flavor strength in the grapes. What role the other factors such as the quality, sugar, tannin, acid levels and aging plays is yet unknown, although it is certain that aging plays an important role. In a wine the strongest flavor will always show as overflowing.

When Can a Flavor be Tasted?

The 2 factors determining if a flavor can be tasted is the intensity and the glass quality. The complexity seems to have nothing to do with this.

Flavor Complexity

Each flavor has 3 tiers listed as Taste Category, Primary Tastes and Secondary Tastes in the flavor list. If the flavor appear as a tier 1 taste it has low complexity, and if it appears as a tier 3 taste it has high complexity.

The complexity depends on the specific vineyard, as well as the quality of your wine glass. Aging also has an effect. The vineyard location has nothing to do with it. Different tends will yield different complexities.

When you build a vineyard, the various states of the vine is determined, as well as the complexity. Just as the attributes of the grapes depends on the tends you do, so does the complexity. This means that if you do the same tends, you get the same grapes and complexity each time. Building a new vineyard at exactly the same spot will NOT give the same results.

How to bring out tier 3 of a flavor in a vineyard

Some wine books require specific flavors in their pure form, i.e. tier 3. Here are 3 ways to bring out tier 3, if your normal tends only yield tier 1 or 2. All 3 solutions create a new chance of tier 3, not a guaranteed success:

• Make an odd tend or skip the final tend. This one requires some closer monitoring of your tends.
• Use another vine type for that vineyard. The vine itself wont change anything, but the altered tends will.
• Tear down your vineyard and build a new one on the same spot. Many will prefer this solution, as it allows them to tend normally with their favourite vine type.

Mixing Grapes

When mixing grapes, the resulting wine will get a mix of the flavors from the grapes used in the mix. For instance if you mix grapes from a vineyard with butterscotch flavor with grapes from a vineyard with raspberry and coffee flavor, the resulting wine will have flavors of butterscotch, raspberry and coffee. Some flavors may be so weak in strength that they will be dilluted and will not appear in the wine. No wine can have more than 7 flavors, so if there are more than 7 flavors total in the grapes only the 7 strongest flavors will be in the wine.

The complexity of flavors in the wine will not be the same as in the original grapes, and can in fact be very different.