The sultan of sauce

Dec. 10—HIGH POINT — Vic Clinco refers to his estimable hot sauce collection as a "borderline obsession."

Obsession? Absolutely.

But borderline? Well, you be the judge.

The 55-year-old High Point man has nearly 11,000 hot sauce bottles — no duplicates — giving him what is widely regarded as the largest privately owned hot sauce collection in the world. All he lacks is the official certification from Guinness World Records ... and he's working on that.

Clinco has hot sauce bottles, factory-sealed and never opened, of all sizes. Some bottles resemble actual chili peppers, while others are shaped like skulls, grenades and sticks of dynamite, symbolizing the heat packed into the bottles. The sauces themselves range from mild and medium to hot, make-you-sweat hot, melt-your-face-off hot and don't-try-this-without-a-defibrillator hot.

He's got all the brands you know — Texas Pete, Tabasco, Frank's RedHot — as well as obscure brands you've never heard of and countless mom-and-pop concoctions. Many of the sauces have catchy brand names — such as Devil's Breath, The Beast, Hellfire, Fiji Fire and Satan's Blood — and some have names that can't be published in a family newspaper.

They're all on display in the large, spacious lower level of Clinco's home, which he has converted from an unfinished basement into a veritable shrine of spiciness. In fact, when he and his wife, Wendy, moved to High Point a year and a half ago, they told their real-estate agent one of their top priorities in a house — if not the top priority — was a basement for displaying Clinco's collection.

"Yeah, most people ask for big bedrooms or a spacious kitchen," he says with a sheepish grin. "I needed a space for my hot sauce collection."

Meanwhile, Clinco has a "HOTSAUC" vanity license plate on his car, a 4-inch chili pepper tattoo on his forearm, and whenever he goes out to eat, he brings along a bottle of hot sauce in a holster clipped to his belt, like some sort of gastronomical gunslinger.

Borderline obsession? The man probably uses a jalapeno mouthwash.

Clinco — the general manager of Hot Shots, a hot sauce distributor based in High Point — traces his passion for hot sauce to his childhood, when he remembers eating jalapenos straight out of his grandfather's garden. Growing up, he seemed to recognize his taste buds were wired differently, with a built-in heat tolerance that most "chili heads" — as chili pepper aficionados are called — could only dream about. He still has some of the trophies he won in pepper-eating competitions.

"There wasn't a challenge that I wouldn't jump on," Clinco says.

His mammoth collection began innocently enough about 26 years ago, when Wendy bought him several bottles of hot sauce as stocking stuffers for their first Christmas together. Soon after, he found a book called "The Great Hot Sauce Book," and he was hooked.

"The book just blew me away," Clinco recalls. "I had no idea how much hot sauce was out there, and all the people who collected hot sauce — I didn't know that was even a thing. I used to keep the book in the car with me, and a Sharpie, and I would check off all the sauces as I found them."

With his wife's blessing — and even with her help at times — Clinco's collection grew with almost reckless abandon, like a pepper that's been fed too much Miracle-Gro. He bought hot sauces at grocery stores, restaurants, farmer's markets, hot sauce festivals, online — you name it. The count eventually soared into the thousands — so many bottles, in fact, that he didn't have room to display them all.

Until now, that is.

Clinco's basement has a bit of a warehouse feel to it, with shelves upon shelves of wall-to-wall hot sauce bottles, sorted geographically. One entire wall features only hot sauces from other countries, with each country designated by a miniature version of its official flag.

Visually, the volume is overwhelming just glancing around the room. But if you actually took the time to examine the collection closely — say, five seconds per bottle — it would take you more than 15 hours to see them all.

Clinco has the collection more or less cataloged in his brain. If you want to see a bottle of, say, Blair's Death Sauce, he can likely point you right to it. His next project, though, will be to catalog the collection on paper — a requirement for Guinness to recognize his hot sauce collection as the largest in the world.

While the hot sauce bottles are obviously the centerpiece of Clinco's collection, he also has other items related to hot sauce that are scattered throughout the basement: Posters. Books. Oven mitts. A decorative shelf shaped like a chili pepper. An inflatable chili pepper. Even a cabinet of liquors that are pepper-infused.

"If it has anything to do with hot sauce, I usually try to pick it up, or someone will send it to me," he says. "I think those things make the collection look more presentable and help it garner attention."

As you can imagine, the collection has already garnered plenty of attention, landing Clinco on the Cooking Channel, Food Network, The History Channel and "The Today Show," among others.

The publicity has paid dividends. When hot sauce manufacturers hear about Clinco's collection, they'll often send him a bottle, or 12, of their sauce to make sure he has it in his collection. That's been a godsend, he says, because at the rate the hot sauce industry is exploding, he can't afford to buy all the sauces that are out there.

"I can't keep up with the growth," Clinco says. "My wife would take my credit cards away, because I would go nuts buying everything I possibly could."

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579