While the wine trade often pokes fun at white zinfandel, it remains on wine shop shelves thanks to significant sales.Nataliia Sirobaba/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
In the name of wine appreciation, I buy white zinfandel by the case. The inexpensive orangey-pink wine from California is a required sample for Wine Spirits Education Trust courses to show students how the sweet wine with low acidity tastes when compared with a sweet wine with high acidity, such as a Mosel Spatlese Riesling.
In tasting classes, despite knowing what to expect when I bring that small sample of to my lips, I’m always taken aback. Its powerful flavour makes my teeth hurt. Students often leave tasting class with a new favourite wine to share with friends; it’s rarely white zinfandel.
Such is current state for white zinfandel, one of California’s defining wine styles at the start of the wine boom in 1970s that has settled into its role as a cheap and commercial crowd-pleaser. While the wine trade often pokes fun at white zinfandel, it remains on wine shop shelves thanks to significant sales. Most provinces have brands that are available all year. Manitoba shows its sweet tooth with nine different skus at LiquorMart outlets, including a three-litre box, Franzia Vintners Select White Zinfandel.
The Oxford Companion to Wine entry for white zinfandel begins with a thinly veiled insult: “undeterred by the fact that it is neither white nor crucially Zinfandel, was California’s great commercial success story of the 1980s.”
Sutter Home is credited with creating a market for White Zinfandel, starting in 1972. According to reports, Sutter Home White Zinfandel was the No. 1 selling wine in the United States between 1976 and 1987. (While white zinfandel was all the rage, many California producers, including Louis Martini, Pedroncelli and Ridge, were making full-bodied red wines from the grape, promoting the variety’s heritage and the abundance of old vineyards available to wineries. These wines remain some of the most collectible Californian reds.)
Sutter Home White Zinfandel was knocked off its perch by chardonnay, thanks in part to the stunning success of Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay. Other drier style wines from California would find favour with consumers as well, such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot and pinot noir, causing wine marketers to cast white zinfandel as a gateway wine. They believed that wine consumers who started with sweet wines would learn to appreciate drier and more nuanced styles.
A quick survey of popular wine brands, not solely ones from California and not just inexpensive bottles, shows sweeter wine styles are still successful. Brand champions Apothic, Menage a Trois and Meomi aren’t as sweet as white zinfandel, but they’re not dry wines either.
Other recent trends haven’t helped white zinfandel’s plight. The increasing fashion of dry rosé, especially the palest pink examples from Provence, France, made white zinfandel even more of an outsider, while the rise in popularity of fruity, fragrant and sweet wines made from moscato grapes further eroded sales. There are numerous sweet wine alternatives available to the white zin crowd today.
Some might see white zinfandel as a mere footnote in the origin story of California’s wine industry, but it’s too soon to write it off. The producers who still make it are the ones that define the category. Sutter Home continues to produce white zinfandel, which is currently available in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Other popular brands that have good distribution across the country are Beringer Main & Vine White Zinfandel and Barefoot White Zinfandel and Gallo Family Vineyards White Zinfandel, both owned by the Gallo family. For those curious, white zinfandel is most palatable served chilled with spicy dishes to help ease any potential toothache.