Chapter 180 Fruit Wine Business
After the army reorganization was completed, Richard came to He'an Primary School. After a year of study, the older children had mastered basic arithmetic of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and the writing of thousands of words.
These children, who are fifteen or sixteen years old and about to become adults, will graduate next spring.
Compared with the playful children of eight or nine years old, these older children have experienced hardships and know the value of knowledge. It is not easy for their families to send them to study, so they study very hard. The three-year basic education is basically completed in one year.
After mastering the basic knowledge, Richard placed thirteen graduates in the army headquarters. These people were the first batch of staff officers trained by Richard.
Those who were strong and able to practice breathing techniques began to practice breathing techniques and were trained as military staff officers. Those with less talent can also serve as the most basic logistics personnel because they have mastered superficial mathematical knowledge.
When he has free time, Richard will also teach them drawing knowledge and assign them some drawing tasks, asking them to mark contour lines.
Once this group of people is trained, Richard will be able to perfect the staff system, establish logistics, combat and other subjects, and form a complete and efficient command organization.
Bonois, Connie, and Alizee, three children with magical talents, also understood the words on the meditation method, completed the preliminary meditation method, and became the lowest magic apprentices.
These three children are not very talented in magic. Unless they make significant contributions to magic research, Richard will not invest magic resources in them.
The three children were learning knowledge at He'an Primary School and interning at the territorial hospital.
Once they learn the magic to treat minor injuries, they can sign a contract with the territorial hospital and become official staff of the hospital.
Annie's magic talent is good. In one year, she has been promoted to an intermediate magic apprentice. She has learned two zero-level magic and can help Sophia do some simple magic experiments.
The time has entered October, and the first snow has fallen in Harland Territory.
Every year when it snows, Richard is extremely busy. He is afraid that if something is missing at work, the new slaves will freeze to death.
The six thousand slaves captured this year were basically placed by Richard on both sides of the Harland Valley.
The orcs built a military station at the northern entrance of the Harland Valley, with existing buildings. The coalition of nobles from Gedda Province also stationed here for several months and strengthened the defenses.
The city walls in the military station are relatively simple to build, with thick timbers coated with mud on the outside and rammed earth walls on the inside. There were trenches outside the city wall, and a moat was dug to introduce water.
The intersection where the military station is located is a strategic point.
Allocating this place to Richard actually increased the burden on the Harland family.
After the army was reorganized, Richard sent the Third Infantry Brigade to station here. Six thousand indentured slaves were responsible for reclaiming farmland suitable for farming in the valley.
There are a large number of wild orchards on the slopes on both sides of the Halland Valley.
Because this place is a key point for the orcs to station troops, it has not been developed.
Now this territory is divided into the Harland family, and Richard built a castle at the entrance of the valley and stationed troops.
The large areas of wild fruit trees on both sides have development value.
The picked fruits can not only be sold for money, but can also be mixed with brown sugar to make preserves.
In addition, Richard also requested to build a winery in the valley to use the fruit resources on the mountain to brew fruit wine and enrich the Harland family's wine varieties.
Brewing fruit wine is not very complicated. The winery has trained seven or eight qualified winemakers in the past few years. After a little exploration, they developed fourteen fruit wine recipes.
Because the packaging of fruit wine is more sophisticated, glass bottles produced in the territory are used.
The fruit wine produced in the Harland territory is five times more expensive than white wine. One silver coin can buy four bottles of fruit wine.
The fruit wine is not sold in retail stores, but comes with an exquisite portable wooden box when you purchase it. The packaging is higher-end than the wines on the market. The taste of fruit wine is sweet, the alcohol content is not high, and the cost is actually slightly higher than that of liquor.
This kind of wine mainly targets the mid-to-high-end market.
Noble ladies and ladies often hold banquets. If the fruit wine from the Harland territory can be used as wine for the nobles' banquets, it is estimated that they can make a lot of money.
If it cannot open up a market among the nobles, even if it is sold at a reduced price, it is estimated that it will not make any money based on the current consumption level of Harland Territory.
Richard sent the brewed fruit wine to Heihe Fort.
Mrs. Olla likes to hold various banquets in recent years and spends a lot of money every year.
The biggest expense of holding a banquet is the consumption of alcohol. The liquor is too strong for ladies. Mrs. Ola spends hundreds of gold coins every year buying red wine from the south.
You can save a lot of money by using the fruit wine produced in the territory.
Although Mrs. Ola thinks that red wine is more upscale when used for banquets, and drinking red wine will give you the feeling of nobility.
But she couldn't refuse Richard's request, and the fruit wine was packaged well, so she used it several times at banquets. Unexpectedly, it won unanimous praise from noble ladies.
Because the price of fruit wine is only half that of high-end red wine, the nobles in Heihe County are also willing to save some.
As the sales of fruit wine get better and better, in the northern region, southern red wine is completely squeezed out of the market.
After all, the three southeastern earls are too far away from northern Xinjiang and do not have much influence in the north. There is no way they can compete with the Haaland family, which is rooted in northern Xinjiang.
They had no choice but to abandon the Northern Xinjiang market and develop their main efforts towards the royal capital.
Richard also looked for wine merchants in the royal capital, but he couldn't break into the royal capital's market. The Third Earl almost blatantly used violent means to monopolize the market.
The red wine business can bring tens of thousands of gold coins to the Third Earl every year. If anyone dares to cut off their wealth, they will kill people and exterminate their clans.
Nowadays, the Harland family's wine has monopolized the market in the three provinces of northern Xinjiang. Richard only gets half of the revenue from the wine sales in the territories of Duke Jonathan and Duke Edward, and the rest is dedicated to the two dukes.
Despite the war this year, the wine business has grown slightly, and the net profit has reached 13,000 gold coins.
However, because the market in other regions cannot be opened, the profits of the wine business are about to be saturated.
Richard estimated that with another two to three thousand gold coins, it would be almost at its peak.
Richard walked through the snow and came to Harland Valley to inspect, and found that most of the new slaves who joined the territory this year lived in simple wooden houses.
Because the brick kiln factory is already fifty kilometers away from the Harland Valley, there is no water transportation for such a long distance, so many bricks cannot be transported at all.
What little it was pulled by horse-drawn carriages was used to build the garrison and fort.
Without bricks, only wooden houses could be built.
Fortunately, there was no shortage of wood resources nearby, so many people did not freeze to death.
Because this group of slaves was in the first year of developing the territory, the conditions were not very good. The old and weak ones still couldn't survive. Richard also saw several children who had frozen to death and were eaten by wild wolves on the roadside. It looked like Very poor.
(End of chapter)