1,300+ Grape Varietals to Try in a Glass of Wine

The Grape Pursuit's Wine Variety Checklist

The following is our complete grape variety checklist. When we have sampled a wine with a particular grape, we will have checked it off in the list below. When a review is available, the grape name will be linked to a landing page featuring our review(s). If the grape was tried in a blend, the highest percentage we've tried will be noted after the grape name (? denotes a blend but exact percentages were not provided/logged).

We are in the process of developing a downloadable version of this checklist and hope to have one available soon!

How We Developed This Checklist

As with any good quest, there have to be a few ground rules. When thinking about how we wanted to define a variety for The Grape Pursuit we had a few questions pop up at the start:

Why go on this quest in the first place?

To be honest, we got sick of passing over lesser-known grapes in the wine store for yet another bottle of Riesling or Malbec. We love those grapes, but we really just wanted to give ourselves a quest to try new wines, and looking at things on a variety level seemed like a fun thing to do. We've found some real gems since starting this project we probably never would've tried otherwise!

What about varieties we've tried prior to founding this site?

Grapes that we have logged prior to the start of The Grape Pursuit will be included in our checklist; however, they will not receive a full review as our tasting notes were not as robust at that time. We will retry all of these varieties over time in order to have a review on this site.

What do we do about naming variations?

Shiraz and Syrah are the same grape. So is Zinfandel and Primitivo. Some grapes have 50 synonyms or more. In many cases we arbitrarily picked a base name for each grape to feature, but for more well-known grapes we often picked the name it goes by in the USA. We will give a check on our list in the first instance of trying a variety regardless of what synonym is used by the producer. We are not logging country-to-country expressions of a single varietal as part of this quest (e.g. Californian Syrah vs Australian Shiraz), but due to our drinking habits odds are good we'll try some of these for common varieties anyway.

What about wines from controlled wine regions that go by appellation names?

Vouvray and Côtes du Rhône are great examples of well-known wines that contain the varietals Chenin Blanc and a blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre respectively. We feel we'd be doing this quest a disservice without trying some of these. While our list does not feature them above, we will develop a separate checklist for these in the future.

What about the fact that “pure” wines are not often 100% of a single varietal?

Many countries allow labels to show just one grape as long as the grape is used in a sufficient percentage (often 75-85%). In many cases, the remaining grapes used are not public knowledge. While we would love to try single varietal bottles (100% of any given grape), we're going to follow labeling information for determining if the bottle was a blend or not.

What about grapes that are only used in blending? 

We want to try these too! But we do recognize that blending grapes, especially in field blends that may have dozens or even 100+ grapes (we've tried one like this), can be inconsequentially small overall. We've decided to check off all grapes that can be confirmed to be in a bottle of wine even if it is statistically insignificant. That being said, we try and note the highest percentage we've tried to date (if unknown, we label with a ?). This helps us be on the lookout for bottles with higher percentages of any given variety!

From there, we had a few more issues come up when researching all the grapes for our list. The following is provided for full disclosure of our process, but we admit may only be interesting for those who really want to dive into the weeds.

First, we did not use any single resource for creating the above list. The above was researched from several sources like listings on Wikipedia, Wine Searcher, Wine Folly, Wein-Plus, Vivino, the Vitis International Variety Catalogue (VIVC), and Jancis Robinson's website and books to name a few. We have no affiliation with any of these entities. Based on our research, we developed an algorithm that used our rules for The Grape Pursuit as a means to generate the list featured above. We recognize that this approach may have errors associated with it including double features via synonyms, spelling errors including removed accents, and/or missing grapes outright.

Second, we only want to pursue commercially available grapes for this project. If the production is quite small and public distribution is only on a single island in the Mediterranean, we're in (vacation, anyone?). If the production is only for experimental purposes or for personal, non-commercial plots we do not want to include it in our list. The currently published list may not address this very well and will be improved upon in future updates; however, we have to admit this information is rather hard to come by.

Third, there are many, many grapes that have a dozen or so genetically similar grapes in their family cluster. Albillo is one good example with close to a dozen. For most of these we had a hard time finding information outlying just how genetically unique these are. To make this quest a bit more accessible we reduced the checklist to feature just the parent grape, but sometimes allowed for white/red variations to appear as well. If we get to the stage where all we have left are 10 different Albillo wines, well, we'll call that a win.

Overall, the above rules helped us develop a great starting point for The Grape Pursuit and we look forward to working our way through the list in the coming years.

Help Us Out

If you know of any wine varietals we missed and should add to this list, or if we are featuring duplicates via synonyms, please get in touch via our contact page. If you have a recommendation on a specific producer, bottle, vintage, or supplier we should check out for any items (outstanding varietal or not), please share that as well. We always love recommendations!

If you are a wine producer that would like to help us with our quest, please get in touch via our Work With Us page!