Comments on: Le Grand Prix du Cépage http://www.winecentury.com/blog/2010/05/le-grand-prix-du-cepage/ the club for grape nuts who have tried 100 or more grape varieties! Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:35:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 By: Thomas Mercer-Hursh http://www.winecentury.com/blog/2010/05/le-grand-prix-du-cepage/comment-page-1/#comment-37645 Thomas Mercer-Hursh Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:03:56 +0000 http://www.winecentury.com/blog/?p=383#comment-37645 If anyone visited my site recently and encountered the broken link to the Vitis database, I have discovered where it has moved. It now has its own domain. http://www.vivc.de/index.php If anyone visited my site recently and encountered the broken link to the Vitis database, I have discovered where it has moved. It now has its own domain.

http://www.vivc.de/index.php

]]> By: Thomas Mercer-Hursh http://www.winecentury.com/blog/2010/05/le-grand-prix-du-cepage/comment-page-1/#comment-37181 Thomas Mercer-Hursh Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:33:34 +0000 http://www.winecentury.com/blog/?p=383#comment-37181 I was recently updating my application on the way to Doppel member, including a few obscure Italian varietals, and it occurred to me that the structure of the current rules is such that one is actually penalized for scholarship. E.g., as of that update, I had 159 prime names, what WCC calls "unique varietals", but, I had 194 cultivar names. While a few of those cultivar names that map to the same prime name are common, like the Syrah/Shiraz thing, the vast majority are obscure names, often treated as unique grapes by wine writers, but which according to Vitis or other sources are considered genetically identical. So, if I were a lazy scholar and just wrote down things as unique when I thought they were unique, I would be a *lot* closer to my Doppel membership. Working hard are doing it "right", I am actually making it harder for me to get there. Given the dubious nature of a lot of this classification (see http://www.a-muse-in-the-cellar.com/content/about-species-and-unique-varieties ), I wonder if we have the right standard. Yeah, there are a few cases where there is, for example, a French and a Spanish name for the same grape, which seems a bit like cheating, but do we really want to not count Primativo and Zinfandel or Blaufränkisch and Kékfrankos (among many others that most would not quess were the same without careful research? I was recently updating my application on the way to Doppel member, including a few obscure Italian varietals, and it occurred to me that the structure of the current rules is such that one is actually penalized for scholarship. E.g., as of that update, I had 159 prime names, what WCC calls “unique varietals”, but, I had 194 cultivar names. While a few of those cultivar names that map to the same prime name are common, like the Syrah/Shiraz thing, the vast majority are obscure names, often treated as unique grapes by wine writers, but which according to Vitis or other sources are considered genetically identical. So, if I were a lazy scholar and just wrote down things as unique when I thought they were unique, I would be a *lot* closer to my Doppel membership. Working hard are doing it “right”, I am actually making it harder for me to get there.

Given the dubious nature of a lot of this classification (see http://www.a-muse-in-the-cellar.com/content/about-species-and-unique-varieties ), I wonder if we have the right standard. Yeah, there are a few cases where there is, for example, a French and a Spanish name for the same grape, which seems a bit like cheating, but do we really want to not count Primativo and Zinfandel or Blaufränkisch and Kékfrankos (among many others that most would not quess were the same without careful research?

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