Ever think of leaving the world of a desk job and head out to your inherited vineyard where you can just make wine all day and sell it for a tidy profit while searching for the long lost recipe of the best wine in the universe?

I know, I know.

It's every person's dream to quit their job and fly off to Europe to begin a career in winemaking, but now you don't have to! In Winemaker Extraordinaire, you play as Maria Bellaventura, corporate lawyer turned heir to an Italian winery turned winemaker and to become the best, Maria must look all over the Earth for new recipes and supplies to turn her great-grandfather's vineyard back into the famous location it once was.

For a casual game, Winemaker Extraordinaire has quite a bit of depth to it. After learning how to select a wine recipe and making a batch of ten bottles, you start taking on orders from other winemakers from the prestigious World Guild of Extraordinary Winemakers across the world in the hopes that you'll be able to re-construct the recipe for the ultimate wine, the Vino Ultimae. For you to gain each piece of the recipe, you must gain the trust of each winemaker by filling orders.

Making wine is very basic. You buy grapes and bottles, then take them back to your winery where making the wine is an automated process. Each type of wine has a certain number of bottles that can be made without any tweaks per day. This number can be increased by playing a proportion minigame where you're asked to put the grapes in a line in the correct proportions before going into the vat. By doing this you can increase the number up as high as you can in terms of bottles per day. Making wine is an automated process, so if your vineyard is set to make a certain type of wine, it will continue to do so until you run out of ingredients.

But quantity isn't everything, it's quality that really counts. Sorting the grapes will give you a wine with a higher star rating, which will not only fulfill a number of orders, it will also fetch a hefty price on the secondary market. To sort grapes, you're given a grid of grapes, twigs and leaves. Sorting means eliminating all the non-grape material by clicking and holding down your mouse to highlight the similar unwanted particles. The more you get out of the vat, the higher star rating your wine will have.

Getting the right proportion and sorting the grapes is necessary for each wine you make, and certainly much more challenging for the more complicated wines. Even after you've gotten the right proportion and sorted the grapes, you'll need to get the ingredients to continue making your five-star wine.

All over the world there are marketplaces with different prices for different materials. Finding the best price on ingredients and bottles is a nice touch for players that really like to micromanage their games. When you make enough wine and fill enough orders, you have the option to expand your operation to other countries, where new vineyards will open up for a price. This allows you to expand your wine recipe collection and your catalog of available wines.

If that wasn't enough, since you inherited both a winery and a vineyard, growing certain grapes is necessary during your journey to success as a winemaker. In a growing minigame, you have to make sure three plots of your vineyard's grapes survive the growing season by providing them with water, fertilizer and pruning. Once the grapes are ready, you can use them to make wine, sell them or use them to fulfill orders. Each vineyard has a different grape for you to grow.

The art style in this game is really top-notch, reminiscent of Italian frescos with a painted style for the character models and maps. Very appropriate to the tone of the game. The music, while also appropriate, is much more of a background affair - not really too noticeable, but still enjoyable and calming to listen to. The attention to detail that Merscom put into the game is simply astounding, with a short history and description of each wine unlocked contained in the recipe book.

If there's one complaint about this game, it's that the tutorial was a little bit unclear. Many casual tutorials will actually hold your hand step by step, telling you exactly which buttons to press and where to go. Winemaker Extraordinaire does that well for the most part, but there were a few times during the tutorial that I was extremely confused as to what location was where and which button allowed me to change wines. It's a small complaint, especially considering that once you get used to the system, it's a very easy game to get a handle on. Also, the orders you've taken on are displayed in a scroll box at the bottom of the screen. The screen is rather clunky and somewhat difficult to manage, especially if you've taken on a larger number of orders.

A quest box a la World of Warcraft would have been a much more convenient move, but again, this is a very nitpicky and small complaint and doesn't really have a large impact on the enjoyment of the game as a whole.

All in all, Winemaker Extraordinaire is an excellently designed game that will bring hours of enjoyment to players whether or not they like wine.