In recent years, you may have noticed some unfamiliar names on wine lists alongside your usual chardonnays and pinot noirs — strange, hard-to-pronounce grapes from places where, until recently, many people didn’t even realize wine was made.

The trend has been around long enough that some of the names, like albariño from Spain or grüner veltliner from Austria, are considered old hat by serious wine enthusiasts. Nowadays, the trendy names include juhfark, from Hungary; obaideh, from Lebanon; chasselas, from Switzerland; and saperavi, from the republic of Georgia.

Some of this newfound love for obscure grapes can be overbearing, a way for wine geeks to draw a line between those who drink pinot grigio — “book club wine,” I’ve heard it called — and the true connoisseur. Still, whether they mean to or not, the snobs may be onto something. In seeking out the rare and arcane, wine geekery may actually be leading us toward richer biodiversity and sustainability, and perhaps even a more enjoyable drinking experience.

For years, the global wine industry had been devolving toward a monoculture, with local grape varieties ripped out in favor of more immediately profitable, mass-market types. There are 1,368 known wine grape varieties, but nearly 80 percent of the world’s wine is made from just 20 kinds of grapes. Many of the rest face extinction.