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Zinfandel is a Red Wine

White Zinfandel is pink

by Mike Supple
published: 20 Jan 2010       | Comments

For new wine drinkers, the choice between red, white and pink can be tricky enough without also trying to memorize the names of all the popular grapes and what they each taste like. So imagine the frustration of a budding wino who finally settles on a glass of Zinfandel - expecting a chilled pink, fruity, sweet wine - only to end up with a room temperature, high-alcohol, black peppery, fruit bomb of a wine. What went wrong? The key to avoiding this unexpected result is understanding the word "white" in front of Zinfandel. Because white equals pink. Seriously.

White Zinfandel and red Zinfandel wines come from the same grape. As with most grapes, the juice from the Zinfandel grape is actually clear - the color of the wine comes from the skin. When a winery makes white wine - usually from green grapes - they squish the grapes and remove the juice from the skins as quickly as possible. The goal for most white wines is to make something elegant, crisp and fruity. For red wines, after crushing the black grapes, the winery leaves the juice to soak on the skins, often for several weeks. The skins make the wine darker red, and they also add complex flavors and tannic acid to the wine. The most common way to make pink wine is by starting with a black grape, crushing it, and then removing the juice after only a little bit of color has been soaked up from the skins. It's almost like making white wine from black grapes.

In the 1970s, the demand for white wine in the United States was so overwhelming that it outstripped production levels. In an attempt to quench the public's thirst, many wineries started to produce "white" wines from their black grapes (like Zinfandel). Like their true white counterparts, these wines were generally fermented all the way so they didn't taste sweet. In 1975, Sutter Home winery had a problem with their production of White Zinfandel , and the fermentation stopped in the middle. This left them with a sweet wine with a lower alcohol content. After tasting the wine, they decided to bottle it and release it. The sweeter Sutter Home White Zinfandel was loved by the public and became such a huge success that many other wineries adopted the practice. There are many White Zinfandels still produced in California today. The best of them are slightly sweet and fairly simple with flavors like strawberry or raspberry jam, and are great for picnics and casual atmospheres.

If sweet pink wine isn't your thing, you might be surprised to find that red Zinfandel (usually just referred to as Zinfandel) is completely different. Fully ripe Zinfandel grapes are naturally higher in sugar than many other black grapes. Since sugar turns into alcohol during the fermentation process, Zinfandel generally has a higher alcohol content than other red wines - often 16% or more as compared to 12-14%. It is typically a full-bodied wine with bold jammy fruit flavors of blackberry, raspberry and black cherry combined with spicy notes of black pepper and cloves. The concentrated flavors and high-octane alcohol content can make this a difficult wine to have with food, since it overpowers all but the most robust dishes.

While the sweet pink White Zinfandel is often scoffed at by self-proclaimed wine connoisseurs, its simplicity makes it an attractive and easy starting point for many new wine drinkers. On the other end of the spectrum, the often hedonistic and intense red Zinfandels have been known to curry the favor of some wine critics while being relentlessly scorned by others.

In the end, you should really just drink what you like. But it helps to know beforehand what it is that you're actually ordering!