Zinfandel

Zinfandel spent over a century pretending to be American. It arrived in the United States in the early 19th century — the precise route is disputed, possibly via Austrian nurseries, possibly via Italian immigrants who knew it as Primitivo — and it found in California a climate so perfectly suited to its character that the grape and the state became inseparable in the popular imagination.

Zinfandel was the wine of the Gold Rush, the everyday red of California's early settlers, and eventually the source of one of the wine industry's most successful accidents: White Zinfandel, the sweet pink wine that introduced millions of Americans to wine in the 1970s and 80s and nearly destroyed the grape's serious reputation in the process.

The identity question was settled by DNA analysis in the 1990s. Zinfandel is genetically identical to Tribidrag — a variety documented in Dalmatia, on the Croatian coast, since the 15th century. The same grape also grows in southern Italy as Primitivo, where it produces dark, structured reds of genuine complexity. The grape is ancient, Mediterranean, and Croatian by origin. California just gave it its most famous name.

What California also gave it was its most compelling expression. The old vine Zinfandels of Sonoma, Lodi, and the Sierra Foothills — grown on gnarled, head-trained vines that are sometimes over a century old — produce wines of extraordinary concentration and character: inky, spiced, and deeply fruited, with a wild bramble quality that no other grape replicates. The White Zinfandel era is largely forgotten by serious wine drinkers. What remains is one of California's most distinctive and genuinely exciting reds — a Croatian grape that found its greatest expression on the other side of the world.