Winemaker Genie [Tasked]

The winemaker is an odd blend: a cat's head on a dog's body, a long trunk for pressing grapes, and an upright stance between 4 and 5 feet tall. Adults weigh around 150 pounds, males a little more and females a little less. They wear no cloth, but drape grape leaves over themselves while the vines grow and are usually soaked in juice by the end of harvest. Most are fluent in many tongues so they can work wherever wine is made.

Winemakers are weak fighters, though an enraged one is unnerving to watch. Its trunk grabs and squeezes a foe for 1d6 points of damage.

It can also draw wine or other liquid into the trunk and blast it out in a cone 20 feet long and 10 feet wide at the far end. Anyone hit saves vs. paralyzation or is blinded by the stinging spray for 1d3 rounds. If the genie has only water, the blindness lasts just one round.

Thrice daily each it can use goodberry, create water, detect poison, speak with animals, purify food and water, and water walk, the last for stirring vats while standing on them. Weekly it can use plant growth, sunshine, and pass plant, though that last works only through grapevines.

Quiet and diligent, winemakers tend vines and casks through every season and oversee the harvest closely. They are wanderers, moving from harvest to harvest and never staying at one vineyard longer than two years. Harvest is their only festival, and then they drink hard and keep the workers laughing with songs, jokes, and clowning at their own expense.

Their fondness for their own product is their undoing. Heavy drinking slowly erodes their skill, and old winemakers become either eccentric vintners pleasing jaded connoisseurs or local drunks and madmen.

They serve only while their masters treat them well, never dilute or tamper with the wine, and never insist on any method or rule, even a vineyard's traditions. They demand total freedom, and the smallest quarrel can send them looking for other work. A winemaker forced into service still makes fine wine, but it lacks the genie's special touch, and such a genie slides into drink and oddity far faster.

Any wine, cider, or juice made under a winemaker's direction meets exacting standards and sells for four times the usual price. They are good company for hill giants, centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, drunkards, and wine snobs, and friendly to anyone who prizes their craft. Some have worked for evil humanoids, others for enlightened caliphs.