Solaris Guide to Wine Making

Building your vineyards

Build a grid of vineyards spaced 4 coords apart in both directions. I recommend building a great number of vineyards from the start, preferably 100 or more if you can manage it. Some flavors take a long time to show, so it is not recommended to wait and expand little by little. Flavors depend on location, and placing vineyards 4 coords apart will allow you to catch most flavors in the area without getting too many vineyards in the same flavor spots.

You may build single vineyards, or you may build them in pairs side by side to get more grapes from the same spot. I prefer building in pairs, but that is up to you.

You also need to set up some wine barrels in one of your compounds. Be sure to have enough wine barrels for your needs, at least 1/4 of the number of vineyards you have. Also be sure to have enough empty wine bottles in your inventory when bottling wine.

Identifying the flavors in your vineyards

Use a good balanced vine for this (balance is a good choice) that does not take too long to tend. It should give high yield and not be too low in acid. Tend all your vineyards until they reach as low a vigor as possible, harvest the grapes and put the grapes from each vineyard in a separate barrel. Remember to label the wines so you can easily identify the vineyard, using either coords or whatever labelling system you have on your vineyards. You may also wish to add the vine type in the label. For information on how to tend vines see the general wine guide. The flavor test wines do not need any alcohol, so you can bottle them immediately if you wish.

You now need to figure out when to taste the test wines. Flavors can take up to 14 vintages to show, so save on your bottles to be able to catch all flavors. I recommend tasting first after 2 vintages to get most of the common flavors, then after 4, 6, 7, 10 and 14 vintages, depending on how many bottles you have. Be sure to save 1 bottle of each test wine for testing after 14 vintages. Use a wine glass of quality 9000 or more for flavor testing.

You can enter the flavor information in the label of your vineyards or in your personal spreadsheet or whatever works for you. Some of the flavors will not show up as tier 3 flavors, which mean you will not get the exact flavor in the vineyard. If you want to identify these flavors, do the flavor testing again using a different vine type for the vineyards in question. Sometimes you can also guess the flavor by looking at neighbouring vineyards.

Making good wine

When making wine you should mix grapes from different vineyards. This will give you more flavors in your wines as well as higher quality. The wine quality is the sum of the quality from all the different grape types, so the more different grapes in the mix, the higher the wine quality. For most purposes quality is not important, so do not aim for high quality in all of your wines.

I usually use grapes from 4 vineyards in each wine. This will give 7 flavors in most wines, a decent quality and a good number of bottles per wine. Mix grapes randomly to avoid getting the same wines.

For most wines I recommend leaving the wine in the barrel until alcohol reaches 12.1% (because of rounding issues you need 12.1% in order to ensure that the resulting wine is 12%). This will make the wine suitable for festivals and for most other purposes. You should also make some 13% and 14% wines for special purposes. Look up wine books to see what types of wine you need.

Let your wines age at least 2 vintages before you start drinking it.

Making wine with specific flavor combinations

For this purpose you first need to have identified the flavors in your vineyards. You do not need to have identified all your flavors, just the ones you need for your wines. If a specific flavor is missing you need to expand your grid of vineyards and hope that you find the flavor. Any flavor may be found anywhere throughout Egypt, so there is no reason to build in other areas or other regions, and there is no guarantee either that you will find the flavor no matter where you build. However, the more vineyards you have, the greater the chance of finding the flavors you need.

Mix grapes from vineyards with the flavors you need to get the combination you are after. For instance, if you need coffee and mint, mix the grapes from one vineyard with coffee flavor with the grapes from one vineyard with mint flavor. For large combinations involving 3 or more vineyards other flavors can dominate so much so that one or more of the desired flavors do not show in the wine, but for simple combinations this should not be a problem. Use different combinations of vineyards or vines for each wine.

The complexity of the flavors will be different in each wine, meaning you will sometimes get many points from each wine, and sometimes none at all (coffee may show only as burnt smells for instance). Taste the wines using a good set of wine glasses, with quality spread fairly evenly from 0 to 9999. If you run out of vineyard/vine combinations just tear down and rebuild your vineyards at exactly the same spot. This will give you new wines with the same flavor but different complexity.