So even in off years (or in years where we're hiding from cruisaders) we have a truly unnatural amount of produce safely stored. Our wizards are fairly pious. Is this close enough to 'forebarance' or some other slight that (had we known better) our characters may have been uncomfortable with it?
Forestalling is holding material until the price rises: that is, it is commodity speculation. It's considered sinful in general in some period texts of theology, but in daily life it is considered sinful when it causes harm. For example, if it lets you gouge your neighbours, or damage their businesses by witholding raw materials.
For your wine lake to not be forestalling, you need to follow a couple of basic steps:
- The entire contents of the lake should be for sale. That is, if a king passed through with enough money, you should have no qualms at all about just selling the whole lot. That you can't find enough buyers to actually sell the lot is not your problem, theologically speaking.
- Your price for sale should not gouge your neighbours. That is, you can forestall by saying "I will not sell my flour until the famine gets so bad that people will pay me the weight of bread in gold." Now, a complication here is that the just priuce for a Hermetic wine lake may be far lower than that for a mundane producer, because its a lot easier and chaper to create Hermetic wine lakes. That being noted, selling at a far cheaper rate, and driving conventional producers out of businss, is likely to break the Oath, and its a sin to break the law.
- You are not required to produce as much as you can, and you are not required to sell it locally.
So, there may be a moral problem, in the sense that the return on your wine sold, is either far higher than your cost of production plus a just return, or breaks Hermetic law. That aside, though, provided you are willing to sell the lot, and you don't fix your prices artifically high, then this isn't forestalling.
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