v1.1.0 — Steam Leaderboards

major update

Grand Cru: The Wine Maker · published 13 Aug 2026, 14:00 UTC

Bonjour, winemakers!

Your winery now has somewhere to stand next to everyone else's.

Two global boards — Total Revenue (what your winery earned) and Most Expensive Wine (the highest price a single bottle of yours ever sold for). Both show your winery name next to your Steam name, and the top wine board names the bottle.
Scores are what the market actually paid — not your list price, not the estimate at bottling. Only closed sales count.
Ranks count from a new game — a save started before this update keeps playing exactly as it did, but it will not post scores. Start a new winery to compete.
Your father's wine never counts — selling his bottles is not your work. That rule has always held for reputation and awards, and it holds here.
Scores post once a year, at the end of winter, for your first 20 years.

Only our server can write to the boards — the game itself cannot post a score, and neither can a tool pretending to be the game. Every entry goes through Steam authentication first, so a score is tied to a real account that owns the game.
New saves are sealed — save files from a new game are encrypted. Editing one in a text editor no longer works; the game refuses to load a modified file. Old saves stay readable exactly as before.

Rankings moved into one place — local rankings and the two world boards are now three tabs on one screen.
Real estate is now a tab under Finance — same screen, same map, one less rail slot. The dashboard and vineyard shortcuts still take you straight there.
Settings moved to the gear in the top bar.
The rail went from 13 items to 9. Nothing was removed from the game.

The wine magazine no longer costs an action point — reading the market should not cost you a season's work.
Bulk clearance can be used more than once per season, with select-all by condition and sorting.
A badge tells you when a wine is ready to bottle.
Tutorial fix — the tutorial could ask you to do something after your action points were gone, leaving the chain stuck. It now makes sure you have the point it is asking for.
The newspaper only reports real events now — 14 filler articles that were not tied to anything happening in your game are gone.
Right-click no longer opens a browser menu.

The score ceiling is gone — a player report showed that with maxed skills and the best terroir, wines capped out in the mid 80s. Two bugs stacked up: new oak barrels silently punished the exact grapes they were bought for, and barrels wore out in the background even though you already pay for fresh oak every year. Both are fixed. Great play now reaches the 90s.
Blending got its reason back — a blend now gains real structure from the pairing, about 4 to 6 points over the parents' average, instead of averaging them down. If you were stuck at 86 on a certain recipe, this was why. It is reachable now.
Barrel costs now match the tooltip — one yearly new-oak budget based on your planted hectares. The hidden 4-year replacement charge is gone.

Chefs could disappear for good — when a contract ran out, or when you turned an offer down, that chef would never appear again. Holding three contracts at once was therefore impossible, which put the Chef's VIP achievement out of reach. Fixed, and a save with chefs already lost gets them back when you load it.
The tasting room could lock up — wines cleared at year end left their display slot occupied, so the room counted 3 of 3 with nothing standing in it. Fixed, and a save already in that state is repaired on load.
Bulk harvest — the inner list swallowed your scroll wheel, so the confirm button stayed out of reach. It now sits fixed at the bottom.
Currency symbols — a few places printed a dollar sign no matter which currency you had chosen.
The tutorial could lose two hints on one click.
Event and newspaper costs now appear in the finance ledger.

Save compatible. Old saves load as before and keep playing normally; only leaderboard eligibility is limited to new games.
Event probabilities now match their configured values (a double roll was making some events rarer than intended).

As always, tell me what breaks. It gets fixed.