The Wine Wars

The Wine Wars were a period of internal strife in Kinilan, triggered by a faked poisoning attempt on King Katayun IX at the Royal Vintner's Gala. Each of the competitors blamed one or more of their rivals for the attempt, and began an escalating series of reprisals against each other over the next several years. King Katayun IX was disinclined to sort things out until one family burned a rival vinyard - causing irreperable harm to the ability to produce one of his beloved wines.

The Conflict

Prelude

The Royal Vintner's Gala was a traditional event during which the King or Queen would determine their Royal Vintner - the noble house granted the contract to provide wine to the Royal Family and the Royal Court. While it was usually held only once or twice in the reign of a particular monarch, King Katayun IX held the event every few years, and competition became fierce. So fierce that there was an apparent poisoning attempt on the king. Motives were unclear at first, but when it was finally determined that the "poison" had actually been a benign purgative called syrup of ipecac, it became more clear that the intent was to sabotage a wine being submitted to the king, or perhaps a faked sabotage to imply that other wine producers felt the particular wine that was spoiled was so superior that they resorted to sabotage - an indicator that it was clearly the superior choice.

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At the time, nobody even suspected the true culprit was Royal Spymaster Ealdwine Andraste. Even to this day, very few outside of House Andraste know the truth of the matter.

Fallout

Tensions between the competing houses rose, and accusations were thrown pretty much at random until every competing house had at least one other house implicating them in the plot. This gave the Royal Spymaster a convenient excuse to investigate each of these houses and leak information to other houses in order to further inflame tensions. Before long, there was a surge in banditry against high end wine shipments - banditry being a popular cover for noble houses attacks on each other...a disguise that might have been more plausible had the wine been stolen rather than simply poured out onto the road. By the end of the year, things had gotten worse, with several wineries and distilleries being raided by ununiformed but clearly trained soldiers, leaving much of their equipment broken and several well-known vintners and distillers being held for ransom.
Two incidents the following year finally provoked an official crackdown on the violence. In the summer, a large oak forest was set ablaze, in an attempt to deny the materials needed to make oaken barrels for aging certain wines, though a unseasonably early rains managed to stop this wildfire before it overran the entire forest. And while the fire raged, a team of Magi arrived in one of the oldest vineyards and brought a combination of magical blight and fire that destroyed the entire vineyard - the fire changing the soil sufficiently that vintners declared that this particular grape could never be produced again. After King Katayun heard of the severity of these escalations, he ordered the army put a stop to the whole endeavour...and when he did so, the Royal Spymaster had all the intelligence reports the army could have asked for.

Aftermath

This year of unrest, already known as the Wine Wars among the common people, resulted in two major changes in the political landscape of Kinilan.
Firstly, the lands belonging to those who had been implicated in the forest fire and the vineyard attack (which, according to the Royal Spymaster's reports, included the majority of houses involved) were confiscated, and subsequently entrusted to House Andraste in perpetuity, thus making them the undisputed masters of the wine industry.
Secondly, the King ordered the formation of a new Kinilan Peace Brigade, a branch of the army charged with monitoring noble activity and ensuring peace throughout the realm. This eventually proved to be a critical decision in the Kinilan Revolution, as many of those responsible for organizing the revolution and developing plans for a post-revolutionary government were members of this brigade, fed up with dealing with the nobility's petty squabbles.

Conflict Type

War