Zinfandel—that naïve domestic varietal

From the chapter: Terroir in peril

Each year since 1992, the Zinfandel Advocates & Producers (a.k.a., ZAP) has been holding its annual Experience in San Francisco, self-billed as “the world’s largest single varietal wine tasting event.” Thousands of Zinfandel lovers, enjoying several days of events, cannot be wrong, can they?

These are, when you think of it, funny times for Zinfandel. As a varietal, it is still considered something of an awkward, bratty, painfully hormonal adolescent among the cognoscente, at least compared certain other varietals. The grape's wines are never really considered “great,” but more like a “naïve domestic Burgundy,” amusing in its “presumption.”

Yet in many ways, it is thanks to the founders of ZAP—particularly classic producers such as Ridge, Ravenswood, Rosenblum and a meritocracy of a few others—that the Zinfandel grape avoided what looked for a time to be an ignominious demise, after over a century of being considered the most important wine grape in California, going back to the late 1800s.

The 1980s were, many will recall, when most of what was being grown was being churned into the discernibly sweet, fruity pink wine known as White Zinfandel. Not that there’s anything wrong with White Zinfandel. Lovers of sweet, fruity pink wines deserve good wine, too.

But instead, the positively huge response to ZAP’s yearly events lit up renewed ardor for the grape in one of its black skinned guises: As a lush, generous, oft-times spicy red wine. Delicious with an endless variety of foods; and delicious by itself, in all its big, bad, brazen badda-bing badda-boomness.

The 1980s trend of “serious” producers dropping the varietal from their lines in favor of so-called “classic” varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Noir was suddenly reversed. New fangled specialists such as Turley and Robert Biale also popped up, creating almost cultish followings for pricey (for Zinfandel, anything over $30 is considered pricey) single-vineyard bottlings. At a time when video was killing off the radio star, Zinfandel was being saved!

Or was it? Somewhere along the line, Zinfandel began to lose some of its luster as a varietal. By the third decade of the 2000s Nielsen market reports were showing steady declines in consumer interest in the category. By the end of the 2010s White Zinfandel was already no longer a thing, and value priced red Zinfandel sales were humdrum.

You can chalk this up to the fact that almost all trends eventually putter out. Chardonnay sales, for instance, were leveling off around the same time, and Merlot never quite recovered from its post-Sideways malaise. Yet, on the other hand, interest in Cabernet Sauvignon continues to go through the roof; and Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio, of all things, just keep rolling along.

The market has always been fickle, but not for reasons most people think. The only thing that can be depended upon as the market evolves is this: Consumers become more sophisticated. We know this to be true in the food and hospitality industry. Of course, it happens in the wine industry.

The downside of Zinfandel during the big boom of the 1990s was that consumers weren’t appreciating true Zinfandel. They were going gaga over an idea of Zinfandel. That is, a conception of Zinfandel as a big, juicy, jammy and, frankly, sweetly oaked red wine. In the ‘90s this was what passed for “varietal character.” “No wimpy wines!” had become a popular mantra, and the t-shirt was even enshrined in the Smithsonian.

“Flights” tasting during a San Francisco ZAP week.

Well, guess what: Many wine lovers, especially younger ones, now seem to be gravitating towards “wimpy.” They want their wines a good 2% or 3% lower in alcohol. Dryer and edgy with tartness rather than annoyingly fat or fruity. Many of them hate the fact that the smoky, sweet, pungent, caramelized, oft-times dillweedy or furniture polish-like taste of oak is practically a Zinfandel signature, especially because barrels have nothing to do with the natural taste of the grape.

Since the turn of the current millennium we seem to be living in a wine world heavily influenced by sommeliers. Everyone is studying to be a sommelier. Like Spartacus, everyone is a sommelier, whether they are working in restaurants or not.

But take a look at the long, seemingly all-encompassing wine lists being written by pin-wearing sommeliers in today’s top American restaurants. Find any Zinfandel on those lists? Maybe one or two, if not zero; but certainly nothing comparable to the long lists of Pinot Noirs, Cabernet Sauvignons, or even wines that many sommeliers wish people would drink more of (i.e. Riesling, Ribolla Gialla, Mencía, Blaufränkisch, etc.). Today’s Zinfandels, it seems, are not quite up to snuff in the world of sommeliers.

In a 2015 post in his popular Vinography page, Alder Yarrow fessed up to some of his own reasons why his enthusiasm for Zinfandel had waned like a shrunken orange since the 1990s:

Let me begin with total honesty. I fell out of love with Zinfandel. When I first got into wine, I loved the carefree jubilation that spilled out of every bottle of Zinfandel I opened. Zinfandel is a wine that makes no apologies for its exuberant fruit.

As authentic as this personality can be, Zinfandel all too easily strays into the realm of caricature. If its boisterous blackberry, black pepper, and blueberry essence is good, surely a bit more of that is even better, right?

Wrong. As much criticism as California Cabernet receives for a shift towards bigger, better, richer, and riper in the last 20 years, in some ways Zinfandel's shift has been even more egregious.

Zinfandel probably started off riper than Cabernet to begin with, as it easily strays into the high 14% and low 15% range while continuing to develop those rich flavors that so many seek from the grape. But in addition to being left longer and longer on the vine beginning in the late 1990s, winemakers in California began to apply increasingly higher levels of new oak to the wines, resulting in bigger, richer, jammier, and sweeter versions of the grape. After a while I just got tired of it.

Apparently I do have a threshold for fruit overload, especially when that fruit is offered almost in singularity, with few other dimensions of interest. And this is precisely what became of California Zinfandel until recently. Many, many of these wines left behind nuance for power of fruit, and as a result, became less interesting to me.

But then recently...

Yarrow went on to describe a recent taste of a restrained style of Amador County grown Zinfandel; plus, “around the same time... a box of six Zinfandels from Lodi, all bearing the same label, but from different producers.” It was Yarrow’a discovery of six 2012 Lodi Native Zinfandels—deliberately crafted in a native yeast fermented, lower key fashion to emphasize the taste of vineyards rather than the sweet, jammy, oaky taste typical of the varietal—that Yarrow found to be “transformative”...

Not only for my vision of what California Zinfandel had become, but also for my opinion of what Lodi was all about. I was back in bed with Zinfandel... the Lodi Natives also inspired my faith in the future of California wine.

Here’s the thing: Most Lodi grown Zinfandels, like most commercial Zinfandels from everywhere in California, are still produced primarily to appeal to consumers with a yen for the jammy, sweetly oaked and Petite Sirah-puffed-up taste commonly associated with the varietal category. But if you have attended any of the ZAP Experience Grand Tastings since, say, 2015, you may have noticed a growing number of Zinfandels that, like the Lodi Natives,

• Put more emphasis on earth or mineral sensations derived from particular vineyards, not just exaggerated varietal fruit character.

• Veer away from the heavy-handed oakiness; in fact, sticking to strictly "neutral" barrel aging.

• Are mercifully lower in alcohol (closer to 13%-14%  than 16% or 17%).

• Have a lip smacking tartness, rather than fat fruitiness; often a level of acidity somewhere between typical Pinot Noir and typical Barbera.

What, in fact, we are seeing is the emergence of an aggravatingly slow evolution towards terroir focus; wines expressing regional identities of appellations or, better yet, individual vineyards, not so much brand styles or a compulsion to achieve "varietal character" in spades.

Put it another way: If, to you, the ideal Zinfandel is Turley’s Hayne Vineyard Napa Valley Zinfandel, why buy anything but a Turley from Hayne? Yet if you ask the people at Turley, they will tell you that they certainly do not believe their Hayne Zinfandel is the be-all and end-all of Zinfandels They might tell you that their lower scaled yet pungently spiced Turley Dogtown Zinfandel from Lodi is just as good or better.

They’ll also tell you that they love the compelling perfume of the Turley Duarte Zinfandel from Contra Costa County possibly even more; which is not to think any less of the leaner, more structured Turley Zinfandel from Amador County’s Rinaldi Vineyard, the sinewy Turley Mead Ranch Zinfandel from Atlas Peak, or the minerally, acid driven, soaring qualities of the Turley Zinfandel from Paso Robles’ Ueberroth Vineyard. In Turley’s world, there is no one, defining sensory profile for Zinfandel. There are, however, distinctive vineyard profiles differentiating each Zinfandel⏤at last count, Turley has been bottling over 35 different vineyard-designate Zinfandels.

As I said, these are funny times for Zinfandel. Grower and winemaker approaches are transitioning in order to keep up with evolving consumer preferences; or to appeal to the tastes of all those pesky, slow-to-buy-in sommeliers, even if most of them still aren’t paying attention. And whether they are conscious of it or not, those preferences are being defined by sense of place, not bigger-is-better.

American Zinfandel is changing before our eyes in response to a changing value system. Not just in terms of what constitutes “good Zinfandel,” but also what constitutes a good Pinot Noir, a meaningful Cabernet Sauvignon, an interesting Chardonnay, and so on down the line.

Consumers, in other words, are getting smarter by the day, and dragging the production industry (even if kicking and screaming) right along with them.

Branding and varietal character are still important, and so is identification with winemakers—the latter, because wine lovers are always obsessed with products stamped by individuality, talent levels or "star" systems. But the more Americans understand wines in general, the more they come to appreciate appellations, individual vineyards, that sense of place that truly defines the most interesting wines.

Once they do that, the more they can appreciate a grape such as Zinfandel: Simply because, when allowed, the cultivar is capable of producing genuinely transparent and distinctive wines.