Starwine

"Unbelievable. This drunken idiot may actually save thousands - millions - of lives by accident. By accident!"
-Appen Vlast, Druid of the Vessa and head of the research into starwine's curative properties

Starwine is a narcotic beverage made from adding starberries to the wine-making process. Treated as a recreational drug for centuries, it has recently been discovered to be effective in the early treatment of a number of deadly ailments in Arikanda.

Properties

Starwine is made by adding starberries, a berry commonly found in the southern Sapphire Coast, to the mixture of grapes usually used for wine preparation. Starberries are named because of a luminescent, almost sparkling purple liquid within the juice of the berries. This gives any wine made from a dim, sparkling purple glow from within the liquid.
Starberries are also both a mild hallucinogen and a stimulant. When mixed into starwine, it gives the drinker a euphoric rush for several hours, along with brightening the colours a person perceives and distorting their vision with scintillations and occasional flashes of swirling purple and white lights. It is commonly used as a recreational drug in the southern Sapphire Coast.
Unbeknownst to most of the world, starwine also has powerful antibiotic properties.

Starwine as medicine

The medical application of starwine owes was discoverer through a combination of pure accident and, later, academic study. Its medical applications were first detected by a noble scion living in the city-state of Dara named Karvo Gaxus. Gaxus had something of a reputation as a drunk among his peers, and contracted pneumonia during a particularly foolish three-day tavern-crawl while already ill in the winter of 461 TE. Gaxus found himself bedridden and was unable to shake his pneumonia as it developed into a life-threatening stage.
As Gaxus came to believe he would not survive, he decided to 'enjoy himself one last time' and reached into his treasured reserve of starwine, drinking himself into a stupor that he did not expect to recover from. To Gaxus' amazement, once he emerged from his bender he discovered that aside from a splitting headache and dizziness, his symptoms had reduced and his breathing was much easier, and through steady ingestion of more starwine, his symptoms faded completely.
Gaxus originally put his recovery down to a stroke of luck, and nothing originally came of this discovery until the following winter, when Gaxus was injured in a tavern brawl and sustained a deep cut to his thigh. Gaxus foolishly chose to ignore the wound, which predictably began to fester. Once fever set in, out of desperation and a sense of curiosity, Gaxus decided to again ingest starwine steadily over the next several days. Once again, after a couple of days of drinking the starwine, Gaxus' fever broke, the infection waned, and his wound began to heal.

Karvo Gaxus, the discoverer of starwine's medicinal properties

This convinced Gaxus that there was something about starwine that was able to treat his illness. Convinced of the miracle properties of starwine, Gaxus sought to disseminate the information to the priests at the local Temple of Essena. His discovery was dismissed for several months as the ravings of a deluded drunk until one of the local priests contracted Legionary's Bane. All attempts to cure the priest failed, and he began to take a turn for the worse. Gaxus again proposed starwine as a treatment. With nothing left to lose, the Templar administered the drink to their priest, and his symptoms again began to wane over several days before receding completely.
Amazed by the cure, the Essene Templar summoned Gaxus to First Temple of Essena in Ormond, where Exarch Pasera herself heard out Gaxus' story and the priests' corroboration. After successful tests on a number of other maladies, the Templar contracted Gaxus, purchased his starwine reserves, and sent him and a coterie of priests to the Academy of Arikanda, to aid the Faculty, the Templar and the Druids of the Vessa in the development of a potential medical treatment. Gaxus, thrilled to be given a chance to redeem his tarnished reputation and to create a great legacy, accepted.
In 469 TE, the present day, research on starwine's apparent antibacterial properties continues. It appears to be able to cure multiple ailments, and if produced on a wide scale, could change the history of medicine forever.

Access & Availability

Starwine is not yet able to be produced as a curative on a large scale, and its properties as such are kept between the Druids, the School of Medicine and the Essene Templar.

Given the relative ease with which the starberries that can produce it can be found, it will be easy to manufacture and distribute once it reaches that point.

Complexity

Starwine is simple enough to produce - the native starberries of the Sapphire Coast are added to the mixture of grapes used for making wine.