White Zinfandel

White Zinfandel is the most commercially successful accident in American wine. In 1975 a fermentation at Sutter Home in California's Napa Valley stopped before all the sugar had converted, leaving a pink wine with noticeable residual sweetness. Rather than discard it, the winery bottled it. It sold, then it sold in extraordinary quantity, and within a decade it was one of the best-selling wines in the United States.

The wine itself is pale pink, low in alcohol, distinctly sweet and simple: strawberry, watermelon, sugared citrus, very little acidity and no tannin to speak of. It was, and remains, an entry-level wine aimed at drinkers who do not especially like the taste of dry wine, and it is usually dismissed on exactly those grounds.

The dismissal misses something important. The success of White Zinfandel in the 1980s created enormous commercial demand for Zinfandel grapes at precisely the moment when California's old vineyards — some of them planted before Prohibition, on their own roots, in Sonoma, Contra Costa and Lodi — were being uprooted for more fashionable varieties. Those vines survived because White Zinfandel made them worth keeping.

The serious old-vine Zinfandel reds that California is now rightly proud of are, in a real sense, standing on ground that a sweet pink wine paid for. It is a genuinely odd piece of wine history, and worth remembering before writing the category off.

Production has declined substantially from its peak as tastes shifted towards dry rosé, but it remains widely made and widely drunk.