Did a little number-crunching on a strategy I intend to try. According to the wiki, wine is meant to take two seasons to go from base to iridium quality. Long wait, but here's my idea: 20 casks per season, six groups of 20 casks. Grand total of 120 casks. Input wine into five casks per week. By the last five casks, you should have created a rhythm of five iridium-star wines per week. I know I'm just replacing lots of waiting with lots of effort instead, but I intend to give this a shot!
Only problem is if you're producing 116 wines per week (ancient fruit in greenhouse into wines) then you're gonna end up with a huge backlog this way. You'd need 116 casks per week for 8 weeks to get a rythm without a backlog. That's a lot of casks.
I'm partly banking on casks being place-able in sheds and such, but that's just the formula for 20 per month. 3 casks per week at 12 per month could probably fit.
Wiki and beta-testers say casks don't work outside of the cellar. You can put them anyplace, but they only function to age things in the cellar.
Seems like it's intended. The cellar /itself/ is part of how you age things like wine or cheeses. The controlled temperature, the humidity, etc. That's actually not too far from accurate, especially where cheeses are concerned. (Where the local fungi and micro-organisms also give a certain character to the process.)
I guess that makes a lot of sense. But still. I don't think I'll bother with aging my wines, I'll just have a cellar and a shed full of kegs and call it a day.
Huh, I notice mead is among the beverages you can cask for improvement. That's interesting, and very fun to plan for. Beekeeping was always one of my favourite things in the game. Probably take me a long time to work up to a cellar, but I do think having a few casks for 'special reserves' as gifts or for fun would be a nice addition. You're right about it being a bother but it'd be nice to have some premium quality mead or wine to give to people as birthday or holiday gifts.
I may go ahead and get another cow and another couple of goats for cheese aging purposes -- I'm running 60 kegs of wine in a deluxe barn (will probably move them to a shed and destroy the barn, unless I decide to move my pigs and sheep there -- pigs and sheep don't need much tending, just watch for the truffles outside and clip the sheep a couple times a week), so I figure 30 casks for aging and sell the rest as is will still bring in a fair amount of change on my current save, so I can use my new save just for trying out new farming strategies and wooing Shane and Emily. I'm currently running over 5million gold on my current save so I just need to get the materials for the shed, and probably more hardwood for more fences.
There's either a bug that makes wine age faster or the wiki shows incorrect information on how long it takes to age wine. According to the wiki wine takes two full seasons to age from no star to iridium star level and according to beta testers it only takes a couple of weeks. And I have no idea which one is true.
I put a few in just to test it, expecting it to take 33 light years. I didn't go downstairs every day but they were done in less than a week. Weird.
I started my cellar week 1 of summer, and now in the last week of summer I just got my 4th load aged and sold, so about one lot a week. Initially I thought that was kind of quick, but it feels pretty good. You've got your source crop grow time, then the time to turn it into a wine, then the week to age.
I suggest reporting it as a possible bug on the beta thread and seeing what CA intends in terms of actual time-frame for casks?
Back on topic, someone mentioned possibly fitting 120 in the basement, so we'll see if this hypothesis is viable.