I’ve always been in the Groucho Marx school of club membership _ I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member. But a club where you drink your way in? That sounds like a pretty good idea.
The group in question is The Wine Century Club, where admittance requires trying 100 different grape varieties. For a change-a-phobe like myself who, left to my own devices, probably would drink chardonnay, chardonnay, Riesling, followed by more chardonnay, this is quite the challenge.
What’s it like?I asked my friend A. who is more than halfway toward his goal of getting to 100 within a year. He’s gotten in the habit of snapping each bottle with his iPhone, which helps keep track, and having knowledgeable and friendly wine shop allies has been a help.
The first 50 weren’t all that hard to come by and most of the wines have been pretty good, he says. “I had a lip-smackin’ Godello, a white from Spain. And have become a bona fide fan of Nero D’Avalo from Sicily — which is kind of the point — to find wines you’d never normally pick up. Fortunately I have a lot of friends (and am married to someone) who don’t particularly care what they drink as long as it doesn’t [vivid two-word combination conveying general lack of quality]. So I bring these oddities to parties and before you know it, they’re gone.”
One way to look at the exercise is as a way to save the varietals that haven’t made it into the “big six” _ Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling.
Ultimately, what A. likes is the club “turns my drinking into a project. It has parameters. It has goals. And along the way you discover new wines, you learn (from back labels) something about the region, about the year, about the topography. It’s like the booze-world’s version of stamp collecting, in this way. It’s educational and world-broadening. And I think Americans need this kind of thing. We still live with Puritan guilt. We’re wayward Puritans many of us and if you can somehow turn pleasure into a project that resembles engineering or scientific inquiry, so much the better.”
I’ll drink to that. Maybe with a Rkatsiteli or a Xynomavro.
No, I did not make those up.
Cheers.