Grape Expectations

Two thousand multiple-choice questions on wine, and ten rounds of ten standing between you and the cellar door.

Grapes and where they came from. Appellations, and which of them is allowed to grow what. Tasting notes, and the wine they belong to. Dessert wines and the four quite different ways a wine is made sweet. Sherry, Port and Madeira. Bottle sizes from the half to the Nebuchadnezzar. Food pairings. Winemaking methods, from bâtonnage to whatever a qvevri is. The producers, the critics, and the monk who did not invent Champagne.

Round one is the easy stuff — what colour Chardonnay is, which country Rioja comes from, what a sommelier does. By round ten you are naming the region a producer sits in and the grape behind a wine you have probably never been offered. Every round is drawn from a harder band than the last, and the rounds are gated:

• Six or fewer and your night ends there.
• Seven or eight buys you one hard question, pulled from two bands higher. Get it and you go on. Miss it and you are out.
• Nine or ten and you walk straight through, with a bonus for the trouble.

Nothing repeats inside a single game, so a full run is a hundred distinct questions out of two thousand, and a good player will be well into the second bottle before they see one twice.

When it ends you can put your name to the score, and it goes into the cellar book — a shared top twenty that everyone who plays sees, shown to you straight away with your own place in it. The cellar book has its own tab on the opening screen, so you can see who you are up against before you start. Your own device keeps a private record too, which is what you get if the shared board cannot be reached.

Scores are added up again on the server from the round-by-round record, so a run has to be one that could actually have happened. It is not cheat-proof — the quiz runs in your browser, and a determined person can post a run they never played — but nothing can claim more than a perfect 57,500.