Zinfandel
California's jammy chameleon; true red zin is soft-textured, dry, medium-to-full-bodied and crammed with blackberry, boysenberry, and plummy fruit.
About the grape
For decades zinfandel was California's most widely planted red grape (until cabernet surpassed it in 1998), and it is a chameleon — made into everything from blush 'white zinfandel' to sweet fortified wine. But the zinfandel that knowledgeable drinkers love — true red zinfandel — is a soft-textured dry red crammed with jammy blackberry, boysenberry, and plummy fruit, usually concentrated, medium to full in body, and notorious for temporarily staining one's teeth crimson. DNA typing in the 1990s revealed it to be the Croatian grape crljenak kaštelanski (historically tribidrag), the same grape known as primitivo in southern Italy's Apulia. Some of California's oldest 'old-vine' vineyards, in Amador and Sonoma counties, are zinfandel.
