You start off with your chateu, a loam hex to plant your grapes, and a third random hex. If you're lucky, you'll end up with a forest space, which will boost the overall output of any surrounding hexes. Emply lots come in handy later as your vineyard grows and you are able to build a work shed to research different ways to manage your grapes, but don't rush into developing it until you've levelled up your chateu and have a lot of cash in reserve.

In my experience, I find chardonay a lot easier to work with while you're still learning the intricacies of foiliage management since it's easier to "pull back" an overripe growth. Yes, it costs more, but it will save you some headaches in the long term as you expand.

After you've worked more with the game and can consistently keep your grapes happy during the growth cycle, you can start off with cabernet to keep a little extra money in reserve for earlier expansion.

As the year progresses from the start of the growing season in February to harvest time in September, the weather can be either your best friend or your worst enemy. Your overall target ripeness for your grapes needs to fall between 5 and 7. Overall scores outside of that range are hard to manipulate back to your final target. As I said before, however, overripe chardonay can still be turned into a perfectly fine 5 star wine.

This is the trickiest part of the game because the weather is unpredictable, but after a while, you'll develop a "feel" for it and get consistent ripeness scores.

Your vines start off with no foliage, but will grow leaves every time it rains. The spring months are typically wet and cloudy, and it's critical to keep them trimmed back to both prevent rot from setting and to help keep your ripeness score going up. If you have a particularly wet spring, it's not uncommon to end up with rot by May, but that can be worked around. The overall goal is to have light foilage by the end of May to help keep your grapes from getting blasted by the sun during the summer. Any rot you have has a good chance of clearing up in the summer.

June and July are critical months for your grapes and the weather can be all over the place. If the spring months and June are all rainy, it's not a bad idea to just get rid of all of your foliage and ride out the rest of the summer. Keep an eye on the weather and just remember to not let your grapes get too much sun.

September is here, and now it's time to get down to business.

There are four stages to turning your grapes into wine: crushing, fermentation, pressing, and aging. You only have one basic method at each stage starting out, but these will expand as you upgrade your chateu and let you do more fine tuning for the more advanced varietals later on in the game.

For Cabernet, a good target score for each is accidity 5, sweetness 5, tanin 4. For chardonay, the targets are accidity 7, sweetness 6, tanin 4. There is some drift with both cabernet and chardonay for 5 star ratings, so if you're close, don't despair. You might not get a 5 star rating, but you'll still get a decent rating and make money.

Body cannot be directly manipulated as it's an average of the other scores.

Starting out, crushing adds 2 to your total tanin score and cannot be avoided. Gotta get the juice out of the grapes, after all.

Fermentation can either be skipped entirely by chosing the "less than two weeks" option or adjusted upwards in two-week slots up to 2 months. Each level reduces sweetness by 1. If your grapes were too ripe, the lowest you can get the score down to is 6. If your grapes were not ripe enough, there is no way to increase the score. Sorry Charlie.

Pressing lets you adjust your wine's accidity. As the game tells you, every 10% of pressed juice you use in your final mix adds 1 to the score. When deciding how much to use, refer to your tanin score because the next stage is going to reduce both and you need to plan ahead.

Aging reduces accidity by 1 and tanins by 2 for every month you let the wine sit. For example, if your pressed wine has both an accidity and tanin score of 10, the first month of aging will lower them to 9 and 8 respectively.

Phew. All done. The rest of this is easy, I promise.

After you've aged your wine, it's time to bottle it up. Unless you're super short on cash, always choose the cork lid and make sure you're picking the right bottle type. Use the red/purple bottle for cabernet and the yellow/green bottle for chardonay.

After you bottle up the wine, it's time to host a tasting and pick your critics. For your first couple of tastings, you're stuck with just the three 1 star critics. As you progress, higher-rated critics open up. ALWAYS pick them first and then fill up the rest with the scrubs. The better the critic, the better your final price.

Finally, allot your bottles to the three distributors. For the first few batches of wine you make, try to keep them evenly distributed.