So, the other day while I was farming and talking to my good friend the cook, I discussed my frustration with a few things related to cooking, farming, and wine production. Through it, I came up with a few ideas, I thought might be solid.
Basically, you harvest your grapes. You press them. You fill a barrel. After 7 in game days, it becomes wine, and in 7 more, if becomes vinegar, etc. Well, that's fine and all... But I realized that if I didn't slow my wine and vinegar creation greatly, we'd be drowning in vinegar, or cabinets filled with buckets of wine.
So, from those thoughts I got:
Sealing Wine Barrels: Basically, you fill a barrel to 100L/100L. You can seal it with whatever liquid, though it won't matter with water or milk I suppose. While sealed, fermentation is halted and quality stagnates. It does not go up if the barrel is better. It does not go down if the barrel is worse. It remains the same. This goes for wort, beer, wine, etc. You can only seal it once before having to empty it completely to be able to seal again; perhaps it would require bone glue to seal as well. This would give an effective means to to store liquids without affecting quality. When you unseal a barrel, it must be emptied. Fermentation would continue while unsealed, so you'd need to transfer from barrel A to Barrel B if you decide it was a mistake -- or bone glue or something.
Wine Bottles and Wine Bottle Racks: Currently, they are useless. Let's make them useful. When you put wine in a wine bottle, the quality goes up VERY SLOWLY the longer it sits there. The speed is affected by the quality of the wine vs the quality of the bottle. If the bottle is below the wine, then the wine would get better at a crawl, so it essentially stays the same. With a vastly better bottle in comparison to the wine, it would be faster, but still fairly slow. In addition, there is a bonus for placing the Bottle in a Rack in a Cellar.
Buckets of all liquids but water; especially milk and wine: Quality degrades slowly at first, but more quickly as time goes on. If it's wine, it doesn't ferment, perhaps, but you're fucking your wine up. Stop ruining it. Milk goes bad. Use it.
There's the one combined idea. Thoughts?