On the origin of flavours

[nudelindarein]

Hello and first off, congratulations on a game well made so far.

I want to bring up an issue with the different flavour outcomes as far as cask ageing and yeast selection is concerned. As a wine nerd myself, the concept of flavour profiles has been multiple times presented to me, by winemakers and oenologists, as an innate property of each grape and soil. Yeasts only play a minor role artisan winemakung and are used for obtaining certain flavours which are considered favourable for early drinking (mostly whites but also reds). Think green apple, cherry and such. Over the years of wine cellaring, these (mostly volatile) flavours disappear and give way to the "original" taste. Thus, most serious producers for fine wine (Piemonte/Bordelais/Burgundy/also Austria, where I come from) do NOT rely on these yeasts.

My suggestion is, giving each vineyard in your game a probability of a flavour for each grape variety (as it is in reality) and de-emphasize the role of yeasts. Why? Because currently your game teaches the newcomer wine enthusiasts, that barrel and yeast solely decide the flavour profiles of the wine and that is wrong.

As for barrel ageing, I find your current gameplay satisfying. Yet I do not understand your concept of reductive wine faults. It seems to happen, no matter what I do. During winemaking, reductive flavours appear when there is a lack of O2-influence on the wine (which is normal during fermentation and pressing) but rarely when the wines are aged in wood (Each type of wood is more or less porous and will allow a certain amount of O2 affecting the wine over the course of barrel ageing). Reduction should not be the case that often, when the wines are aged in wood.

On a side note, why not make it possible to taste the wine during the different stages of winemaking (siphoning a glass of wine from the barrel surely doesn't take one round ;) )? I do realize, that whithout giving options to change the course of winemaking it does not make much sense.

Thank you for this game though, to a certain point I do enjoy it already and there is certainly potential for more!

[yveshohler]

Thank you so much for your feedback

I see your concern about the yeast-> flavour outcome, what's not clear enough in the game is that every vineyard you plant you will have a new autochthonous yeast that naturally live on the skin of the yeast.

So the reality is that every vineyards have their own yeast, and not having yet the enzyme in the game ( nor batonnage ). BUT that sayed the yeast is responsible for part of the formation of bouquets during fermentations based on their phenotypic characteristics.

With the reduction faults, at the moment we do not have the copper treatment in place ( nor do we have planned yet :( ) and in the game it's given when, during fermentation, you do no pump over ( or just 1) and you have a deficit of O2...
So what's happen, that you go with a reduced wine in the barrel and GG.

At the moment the pro player do this in the game, just bottle a minimum amount of bottle, taste it and if it's not good or need more body or have some faults, they sell the bulk or do aging and/or malolactic and so on :D

We have so much more to tell with the game, but i think we will need some extra years of development