Zinfandel: California's Historic Wine

Did you know that Zinfandel was the most widely planted wine grape in California before prohibition? As you may recall, for a long time Zinfandel was called the "California grape" since it was only produced here and also because we couldn't track its European counterpart. But we really knew all along that it's not native to America. It just doesn't have the appearance or growing habits of a Native American variety. Finally, it was traced back to Croatia, and there will be more detail on that below, but even though the variety itself may not be uniquely American, the name and the wine certainly is. Here's a little background.

Zinfandel comes to California

There's some evidence that Zinfandel first came to the east coast of the US from Austria in the 1820s and was enjoyed there mostly as a table grape. It made its way out to California, known as mainly Zinfandal [sic] or Black St. Peters, around the time of the gold rush and quickly proceeded to become the king of wine grapes here. You can look to its generous and easy-going nature to explain this. Aside from being delicious, it's adaptable to many different situations and is rather prolific when it's allowed to be. They were quite inventive and made red, white, rose, sparkling wine and dessert wine from this one grape which they called Zinfandal, Zeinfandall, Zenfenthal, Black St. Peters and occasionally even Zinfandel, the name that finally stuck!

California was vigorously approaching its first wine boom at about the same time phylloxera began devastating vines in Europe, around 1870, which actually helped to fuel the industry here. As vines died all over Europe new vineyards and wineries grew like topsy all over the north coast, Livermore and Santa Clara. At its peak for the century, California had about 800 wineries.

So, it was high times for Zinfandel until California had its own brush with phylloxera in 1890. Most of the wine grapes in the state were destroyed by it. Because we were able to benefit from the European's experience with it, replanting and recovery came about relatively quickly. The crowning glory came in the form of 36 medals and 4 honorable mentions for American wines, the great majority coming from California, at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Prosperity had returned, but didn't last long, as states began to go dry, one-by-one, in anticipation of prohibition. The 18th amendment, called the Volstead Act, took effect in January of 1920.

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