Thank you so much for the hints! I too didn't have the xxx's and was hopelessly stuck on part 4. Was going insane too!
To the best of my knowledge, the only place where there have been any format hint in this mission, was on Step 5.
Cheers! Nice mission but... Spoiler: death of my nerves even though I had the right ideas I failed to solve it without looking into spoilers, because A) a missing accent should not render a solution wrong... B) for the Quinone drink some Xes as idea would have been great. And the colors are hard to take as blanc, rose et rouge. But as others have said, when working backwards it is ok. Question: Why is "TEXT FILE" a hint in the direction of <solution>?
Thanks for the feedback Mercury. Spoiler TEXT FILE appears currently when we leave a clue empty. Clearly we will need to change that.