#viticulture

by Yisrael Medad

To create the impression that wine was produced in ancient times by a “Palestinian people” who were not Jewish is an act of identity erasure. To retroactively create an Arab people called “Palestinians” long engaged with growing grapes in the hills of Judea and Samaria while excluding the Jews engaging in that very same activity is a crime of identity theft.

Asimov then writes that Khoury “was one of the very few winemakers working in the region before the October 7 attacks,” and informs his readers that “winemaking is not widely practiced today in the West Bank.” There are over two dozen wineries active in Judea and Samaria. Many of them, such as Shiloh Winery, Psagot Winery, and Tura Winery produce wines that have garnered international recognition. Various online sites, like KosherWines.com, list over 50 different wines made from the region’s grapes. Millions of bottles have been produced, with many going for export.

However, as those wineries are owned by Jews, Asimov totally ignores them. Even in passing, they are not even mentioned by the newspaper of record. The reader, drunk on the propaganda, is left with an erroneous and biased impression

Before Israel was established, during the mandate period and even before, if “Palestine wines” were talked about, the reference was to Jewish wines. In 1848, Yitchak Shorr established a winery in Jerusalem, the first one documented in modern times. In 1882, French Baron Edmond de Rothschild assisted in the establishment of the Carmel Winery which still produces wine.

Asimov facilitated the grafting of ancient Jewish winemaking onto a theft by self-declared “Palestinians” of that aspect of Jewish history, falsely claiming indigeneity. Not only do Asimov and his publication peddle false assertions but, given both their statures, who would or could deny their truth? This is deceptive emplotment.

Incidentally, olive trees are an instrument of ethnic erasure, too. In an article on political ecology, “Olive Oil and the Tastes of Palestine,” Omar Qassis acrobatically avoids the Jewish demographic and horticulture character of the Land of Israel. In his very brief mention of the history of olive tree cultivation here, Cassis leaps from the early Bronze Age to the mid-19th-century Ottoman Tanzimat reforms; no Jews.

Numerous mentions of olive oil in the Tanach, oil for anointing kings and priests, and oil for the rekindling of the candelabrum which marks the upcoming Hanukkah holiday are wiped clean.

Game companies are rarely so easy to write about as Stonemaier Games. There’s a narrative of the company’s lifespan and the central vision of the person positioned making decisions about it, and about expressing its values. It feels like just being aware of modern board games involves, at least in part, being aware of Stonemaier Games. What they did most recently, what your favourite game of theirs is, and what you remember of where they started. What’s more, helpfully, the games are extraordinarily well made, even if the game system itself isn’t to anyone’s taste.

For me, I was aware of Scythe, but then confused by what I heard of it. It was a big expensive game in a space where I couldn’t afford to engage with those. Then we saw permutations like My Little Scythe and then Wingspan and then digital editions and I started reading the blog and watching the Youtube channel and dangit, there I am, now formulating opinions on the ‘corpus’ of Stonemaier games.

Viticulture is now the ‘oldest’ Stonemaier game I’ve played, first being released in 2013. I didn’t use my own copy for this, I am confident expansions were added, and I didn’t pay for it. I also didn’t play the game a lot, and I don’t think you should buy the game based on this article. Instead, I want to talk about the idea of a game that expresses an ideology, and how it communicates values.

Consider this a description of philosophy engines.

First of all, Viticulture in the simple, genre-as-handles sense, is an opulently produced worker placement game where you play family-run vineyards in an Italian-ish probably pre-modern community. Over the course of seasons you prepare vineyards, grow grapes, harvest and ferment them, and sell them on as part of ongoing business relationships. You don’t just sell wine, you get residuals, as the sales of your wine send money further back up the chain to you. You’re doing this in competition with players who have almost entirely the same mechanical portfolio you, with limited opportunities each year of turns. Not everyone can plant, not everyone can harvest, not everyone can take visitors around the vineyard.

The worker placement element comes in very literally; you have an assortment of worker meeples, which are split into a Grande worker, two summer workers, and two winter workers, with an optional hireling one player can get each turn. In the summer season, you can place your summer workers, in the winter season you can place your winter workers, and in the other types can be used at all times. There’s an option to upgrade those workers, so they can do more on each season but also so they can work in either season. The slots where you place your workers start at a base, but you can upgrade the spots, though upgrading those spots benefits other players as well because they definitionally get to use the upgraded spot before you do.

What’s more, there are visitors, characters that come to your vineyard, some in summer, some in winter, and these visitors can do stuff, giving you ‘compiled’ actions. Maybe you can spend a card to generate a bunch of wine that would normally take two actions, or only available in a different season.

The game plays out to a number of turns, no matter how well or poorly anyone is doing, and you compare scores once it’s over.

First of all, Viticulture is a game of systemic symmetry, overwhelming complexity, and un-optimisable loops. Despite how these things may sound, they’re all perfectly reasonable things in my opinion, and indeed, I think Viticulture uses these ideas well.

First of all, systemic symmetry. Every system in Viticulture is the same for all players at the same time. Players do not get unique powers or effects; instead, your starting situation determines things like your starting inventory of pieces, but not about anything you can do that nobody else can do. This extends to all actions; there’s simply no way to do anything in the system that another player can’t do just as easily with the same or a similar card or using the same place. Nominally, this means that players are all literally generic — if every player can take the same actions, surely there’s a best action on each turn that everyone should do? That’s where the next step comes in.

That’s where overwhelming complexity shows up. Viticulture has an enormous number of pieces. The cards represent an immense variety of near-bespoke pieces; there are some cards with identical or similar effects, but you can’t rely on any of them showing up, because the variety is just too large. The best play options are to respond to the meaningful information that you have. You can’t exactly build a plan around getting pinot grapes, because you might not see those. Instead, your options are to look at what you have and how they amplify and improve one another, and in what order.

This leads to the idea of un-optimisable loops. Every single thing in Viticulture, to some extent or another, feeds on everything else. With a few exceptions, there are very few actions you can take that don’t have some way of being improved if you do some other action earlier. You can consider the shape of your game being a loop, and you have to choose where in the loop you’re going to start. No matter what you pick, another player in your same starting position might choose to focus somewhere else in that loop.

All of this is to say that the game system, the engine, of Viticulture could be cooked down into a system that’s roughly the same size as a game like Monopoly in a smaller box. What gives the game its depth and its appeal — to me at least — is entirely about the way that this game uses its increased size and material components — its stuffness — to make that simplicity untouchable.

This isn’t just a matter of piling dozens of variations onto everything in the game, though, because you can make a game more complex without making it better. Rather, the depth added to Viticulture by its layers of systems has to also be wedded to being accessible, which is why the game has so many reminder pieces, so many visible tracks, so much clearly reused visual language.

Presented like that, though, it becomes more evident the way that Viticulture is a game that — like many Stonemaier games — relies on the thoroughly excellent interface of the game. Interface in this case refers to elements like the rulebook, the reminder tokens, the writing of the rules text on cards and in the larger books. The game is indulgent, yes, with things like several different types of specific meeple for specific game mechanic markers, but it isn’t just about looking very good, but is part of the kind of game the game can even be. Quantity is a quality of its own, in a game of this scale, and it’s interesting to see how much the mechanisms of Viticulture are informed by just what it can be.

Anyway, hey, notice how in Viticulture, the vineyard owners can’t be placed to do work, but the people who do work are literally undifferentiated objects?

Hutterite faience or Hutterite ceramics is the collective name for the production of majolica (faience) in the territories of the present-day states of Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Russia, created in the environment and tradition of the Hutterite national and religious minority settled there between the 15th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The Habans immigrated to Slovakia in the 16th century and settled in its western part. Here they also influenced the development of the production of domestic ceramics. They contributed to the improvement of its quality through the innovation of adding a lead-zinc white opaque glaze and their traditional painted designs. The colours yellow, green, purple and blue were characteristic of this type of pottery, with black accentuating the contours. Typically, the colour red was omitted. Red was not used at all, for religious and philosophical reasons.

In the last third of the 17th century, after the journey of the Hutterites to Holland, an innovation in patterns is visible. They began to paint white and blue majolica, which imitated Chinese porcelain. They adopted the features of Dutch Delft faience, Chinese landscapes, architecture, birds and plants. Motifs from Turkish faience, such as tulips, carnations, lilies of the valley and berries, also appear in their work during this period. These foreign designs persisted throughout the 18th century.

From the second half of the 18th century onwards, the influence of the Slovak environment is noticeable. Agricultural motifs, scenes from the stories of saints and patrons began to be used. The process of the discolouration of Haban majolica began.