Do you remember the infamous Century Club from the 80's and 90's? If you happen to be a member, you probably don't remember much. Basically you could earn bragging rights by downing 100 shots in 100 minutes - and even we weren't stupid enough to try this one, although we did attempt to put back 100 shots of beer in under 2 hours (and I don't think any of us succeeded).
The other day I read about a far more sophisticated and intriguing take on this exercise, which appealed to the sommelier in me : try 100 bottles of wine, no time limit, but each bottle had to be of a different varietal. I love it! And in case you do too, I will document our journey in this very blog so that you can give it a try as well...
The first step was finding a decent list of common varietals online (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grape_varieties) from which I ticked off 37 right off the bat, since I don't think I need to try another bottle of merlot, chardonnay or syrah. From there, I started to pick out new varietals to sample, and began searching for wines using the advanced search function at www.saq.com, which allows you to pick from a drop down list of 200+ varietals. Truthfully, it will be hard to find an additional 63 to sample - for many of the varietals in their list there were no readily available wines, but if necessary I'll make a run to the LCBO once I have exhausted my options here...
To start, here are the grapes we have therefore already ticked off the list:
Reds: Baco noir, Barbarossa, Barbera, Grenache (aka Garnatxa), Lambrusco, Malbec, Petit verdot, Pinot noir, Primitivo, Sangiovese, Cab franc, Cab sauv, Cab severny (our home grown Carone wines offer a couple of good ones), Carmenere, Dolcetto, Gamay, Merlot, Montepulciano, Mourvedre, Nebbiolo, Syrah (aka Shiraz), Tempranillo, Zinfandel
Whites: Chardonnay, Chenin blanc, Fume blanc, Gewurztraminer, Marsanne, Muscat, Pinot blanc, Pinot gris, Prosecco, Riesling, Rousanne, Sauvignon blanc, Semillon, Viognier.
Now in some cases it will be near impossible to find bottles of pure varietals, since certain varietals are generally offered as blends (i.e. Marsanne and Rousanne), but we've given ourselves the liberty of ticking off a varietal as sampled assuming it is the primary grape in a blend with a maximum of 3 varietals...
And so off we go! Stay tuned as we update you with our varietals of the week, and slowly whittle down the list of the remaining 63 grapes.
