Wine Century Club

"It’s a serious hobby that’s gone awry," says Walter Rachele, referring to the Wine Century Club, as reported by Sara Murray in the Wall Street Journal (6/26/10). The hobby is trying as many different varieties of grape as possible, based on the Wine Grape Varietal Table. It’s even more daunting than you might think: "Of the most common vine species used for wines, there are 10,000 known varieties, and each variety yields a different grape."

Membership in the Wine Century Club is free, but you need to buy a Wine Grape Varietal Table, which costs about $30 from Steve De Long and his wife, Deborah, who created it. You also get a checklist of 185 varieties and you’re not a member until you’ve sampled at least 100. If you get to 200, you’re a Doppel member; at 300 you’re a Treble member; and at 400 you’re a Quattro member. So far, only one member is a Quattro — Thomas Reagan, a retired airplane captain, who has tried 461 grapes.

It is possible to get to 152 grapes in a single sip of Cento Uve, but that’s cheating and not allowed under the rules. While some members think the concept takes the snobbery out of wine connoisseurship, connoisseurs say "that the focus on numbers and check-off lists can limit true wine appreciation." As Anthony Giglio of Food & Wine magazine notes, "I like the idea of saying let’s try different grapes … but you can’t draw a conclusion about any grape just by tasting it once." Maybe true, but the club, now five years old, has attracted 800 members worldwide.