We start with our chateau, one loam tile and a random terrain tile (lake, forest or empty plot). We spawned in with a lake. It would be better for us to spawn in with a forest tile, as they increase any adjacent tiles harvest by 10%, but not all is lost here.



We go ahead and plant Chardonnay. It costs more to plant and more to maintain than Cabernet, but for our purposes, we are taking the expensive path. It may very well be advisable to start with Cabernet, as it will provide you with much more cushion for error, though it is not, by any means, necessary, as you will see.



Oh, it's May and we already have a fungal rot situation. Fungal rot reduces harvest by 50% per month while it is active. You can try to force it gone by trimming your vines and letting ripeness rise above 3, but you never know what the weather will be like later in the year. I prefer to just suffer this loss to our harvest for now.



Well, we made it to November and as you can see, the fungal rot gave us quite the beating. Our harvest, by now is only 0.6 tons. Seems like everything is going terribly. But we are still fine. The grapes have great stats for our purposes and this will surely bring us some much needed money.



Here we are at the end of the crafting process. As you can see, we did not really do much to our grapes. We crushed them in the only option for crushing, and we added 10% pressed juice. We only finished our first year with 3 barrels of wine though. Seems pitiful. But again, the wine seems pretty solid. This is NOT the perfect formula for a Chardonnay, but this guide is not here to give you that answer. You'll have to experiement for that yourself.



Here we put it into the appropriate bottle and we stick a cork on it. Why? Well, we're spending money, remember? And we're going to get by while doing it. This is going to be great. Next we need to organize a tasting. I'm sure we'll do fine.



And the results are in! Seems like the tasters love it. A 5-star wine is just what we need right now. After all, we only ended up with 360 bottles of wine. Not a whole lot to stake our survival on, but it's what we were left with.



Now we sell our lovely wine to the bottom of the three distributors. But we only sell 1/4 of our bottles at first. As you can see in the shot below, as our distributor rating goes up, the price we can sell our wine for with the distributor goes up. This is essential to making sure we can survive another year. Continue to sell 1/4 of your original harvest (90 bottles in my case) each time they run out until you reach a 5 rating. Then sell off everything else.

The second year starts off pretty rough as well. It's only May and our grapes are already overexposed to sun. We just have gotten no rain so far this year. Overexposure stops our grapes from producing any more once the modifier applies. At least at this point, we have about as much harvest as last year. Lets hope for a bit of luck to pull us out of this.



By August it has rained a bit, enough to give us some foliage and stop us from being overexposed to the sun. It's a bit late in the year, but I'll take it.



By November, we've gotten our ripeness down to 7 and managed to pick up a tiny bit more harvest. This brings us up to 0.8 tons of grapes. Still not a stellar year.



But the grapes are decent quality again and we can work with this.



We bottle it in the correct bottle and cork it again. No point becoming thrifty at this point. We have to stick to our guns here.



Another beautiful 5-star wine. And we did this with the new 2-star reveiwer we unlocked at last years tasting. This is beneficial because wines reviewed by higher rated people sell for more.



Here is the wine's stats. As you can see, they are not the same as last year's stats. This still is not the perfect Chardonnay, but at the lower tier reveiwers we have a lot of wiggle room.



Here you can see how much the price of our wines have gone up between the better reviewer and the distributor level. Our wines are almost double the price they started out as last year.

Third year and it's only May.... and more fungal rot. Well, no one says RNJesus is merciful.



Well, it's november and we've managed a banner harvest for our little winery. 1.1 tons! This is almost as much as we made the last two years combined. If we survived on half of this, imagine how great things are looking this year.



Bottling and corking. Lets spend that cash. This is going to be huge for us.



We used the new reviewer we unlocked last year, meaning we have two 2-star reviewers and one 1-star reviewer. Our wine ended up with the same stats as the first year and still got a great review.



With the new reviewer and the high distributor rating, our wine price is tripled from the first year. Seems like we've got this under control. We're going to sell everything in hopes that it brings in enough money to let us buy another plot.



Well, it's March and we only have $28K. Guess our wine did not make us enough to safely buy another plot. Maybe next year, but at least we are sure that we can survive the first two years with terrible harvest and the highest expenses. I'd prefer to wait until I have about 35-40K in cash before I buy my second plot, just to make sure I can bottle my next harvest.

And here's hoping the weather is nicer to you than it was to me this game.