User:Sagen/Viticulture/Proposed Law

Whereas Egyptian Vintners recognize the following to be currently true:

• Viticulture is not a test in and of itself, although the products of viticulture are used in various tests;
• Vintners must expend huge amounts of resources to cover large areas with vinyards to test for flavors;
• Vintners need to grow plenty of grapes on each vinyard to have enough bottles to test at various vintages, requiring a large investment of time, multiplied by the number of new vinyards they build each vintage;
• Vintners must take copious notes for flavor tests to keep track of where flavors came from for each new vinyard and each time the wine is re-tasted at a different vintage;
• Vintners must wait for wines to age in the bottle for new flavors to emerge and it takes 30 game days (approximately 10 Real Life days) for each vintage;
• Vintners need to wait up to 14 vintages (140 rl days) to find some flavors;
• Vintners must first find the flavors needed for wine notebooks and then produce the wine, forcing them to wait another 1-14 vintages for the flavors to emerge in the wine;
• Some flavor blobs appear to be very small and others (apparently this is particularly true of undesirable flavors) appear to be very large, forcing vintners to choose between spacing vinyards out (and missing small blobs) or packing them close together (and finding relatively few new flavors);
• Some flavors such as "Green Olive" and "Bell Pepper" seem to be present in overabundance;
• Many vintners are sick of finding that vinyards that originally produced pleasant flavors later begin to produce disgusting and/or chemical flavors in the same wines, ruining carefully crafted flavor combinations;
• Many flavors needed for the wine notebooks have still not been found (not just melon, but also Tobacco, Blackberry, Tea, and various spice flavors) as far as can be told from information shared on the Wiki;
• Many citizens of Egypt prefer occupations like wine making or beer making to pursuing various tests and all of the above can make viticulture nearly a full-time occupation (and a real life full time occupation at that);
• Some vintners are so disgusted with some or all of the above that they eventually leave Egypt;

Be it resolved that the citizens of Egypt and especially the vintners of Egypt petition the Pharoah and/or the Gods to change viticulture in the following manner, to the degree that it is possible to do so (if not in this Tale then the next):

1. Reduce the number of vintages that it takes flavors to appear by half, redistributing flavors among the first 7 vintages as needed so that they are more evenly distributed (it is ridiculous to have to wait 140 RL days to find out all of the flavors that might be in a wine);
2. Even out the size of flavor blobs so that vintners don't have to waste time and resources testing huge blobs where all vinyards turn out to have the same flavor;
3. Change the distribution of all flavors so that they have a more or less even chance to occur in a given area (in other words, we are sick of finding "Green Olive" and "Bell Pepper" everywhere);
4. Flavors that are meant to be rare can remain so by substituting them for one of the more common flavors (preferably in a predictable manner, e.g., melon always replaces apple) in 10-30% of the blobs for that more common flavor;
5. Make vinyards collapsible into a "Kit", much like beer kettles, so that they can be moved to new locations without destroying materials (after all, they probably weigh about the same as a brass kettle with 4 copper sheets added to it);
6. Substitute other flavors for most of the huge number of undesirable flavors that seem to appear at later vintages, especially the chemical flavors and the animal smell flavors. Suitable resplacements can be found at: http://wineintro.com/basics/flavors/ =or= http://tashian.com/wine-flavors/
7. Include coordinates of the vinyards that grapes came from in the wine info when a player siphons a sample of the wine, and add a clipboard option to that screen so that the information can be copied and saved by the player.