Zinfandel: The History of California’s Signature Grape

Zinfandel is the grape Americans have long called their own — the bold, brambly red of the California Gold Rush, the source of the state’s oldest surviving vineyards, and, in its pink form, the best-selling wine that accidentally saved them. Yet for a century and a half, no one knew where Zinfandel actually came from. Its true origins were a genuine mystery, solved only by modern DNA science in one of the great detective stories of the wine world. This is the history of Zinfandel: where it came from, how it conquered California, and why it matters.

America’s mystery grape

For most of its history, Zinfandel was a puzzle. It grew nowhere else under that name, and it seemed to have no obvious European parent — leading many to assume, wrongly, that it was a truly American or uniquely Californian variety.¹ The mystery only deepened when, in the 1970s, scientists noticed that Zinfandel looked and tasted remarkably like Primitivo, a grape grown in the Puglia region of southern Italy.

DNA fingerprinting in the 1990s confirmed the hunch: Zinfandel and Primitivo were one and the same grape.¹ But that only pushed the question back a step. If Zinfandel was Primitivo, where had Primitivo come from? Neither Italy nor California, it turned out, was the grape’s true birthplace — and the answer, when it came, lay across the Adriatic.

The Croatian solution

The breakthrough came in 2001. The UC Davis geneticist Carole Meredith, working with the Croatian scientists Ivan Pejić and Edi Maletić of the University of Zagreb, hunted for Zinfandel’s origins along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia — and found a match.² In a single old vineyard at Kaštel Novi, near Split, just nine surviving vines of a nearly extinct local grape called Crljenak Kaštelanski proved, by DNA, to be genetically identical to California Zinfandel.

Further research revealed that this grape’s oldest recorded name was Tribidrag, documented in Croatian records as far back as 1444 — centuries before the name Primitivo appeared in Italy (around 1799) or Zinfandel in America (first noted in Boston in 1832).² The “American” grape was, in truth, an ancient Croatian variety that had travelled the world and very nearly died out in its own homeland. It was one of the most satisfying discoveries in the history of wine science.

How it came to America

Zinfandel’s journey to the New World ran through an emperor’s greenhouse. In the early nineteenth century, cuttings of the grape reached the Schönbrunn imperial plant collection in Vienna, and from there, in the 1820s, the nurseryman George Gibbs imported vines to Long Island, New York — not for wine, but as a table grape to be grown under glass.³ It was on the East Coast, in the 1830s, that the name “Zinfandel” (in various spellings) first appeared.

From there the grape moved west. In the early 1850s, as the Gold Rush drew fortune-seekers to California, cuttings were carried from New England to the Pacific coast — the sea captain Frederick Macondray is among those credited with bringing it — and Zinfandel found, at last, a climate that suited it perfectly.³ In the warm California sun, the modest hothouse table grape of the East became something entirely new: a great red wine.

The grape of the Gold Rush

Zinfandel and California grew up together. The Gold Rush of 1849 flooded the state with thirsty newcomers, and Zinfandel — productive, adaptable, and delicious — became the workhorse of the booming young wine industry.⁴ By the 1880s and 1890s it was California’s most widely planted wine grape, the backbone of everyday red wine up and down the state.

Much of it was planted by immigrant families, especially Italians, who set out mixed vineyards — “field blends” in which Zinfandel grew interplanted with other varieties like Petite Sirah, Carignane, and Alicante Bouschet, all picked and fermented together.⁴ These old vineyards, dry-farmed and head-trained on the state’s hillsides and valley floors, became the living foundation of California wine — and, remarkably, many of them still survive.

Old vines: a national treasure

Some of Zinfandel’s greatest wines come from its oldest vines. Scattered across Sonoma, Lodi, the Sierra Foothills, and beyond are blocks of gnarled Zinfandel planted in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s — among the oldest producing vines in the Americas.⁵ Low-yielding and deep-rooted, these ancient vines give wines of extraordinary concentration, complexity, and character.

For decades such vineyards were undervalued and constantly at risk of being pulled out for more fashionable grapes or for development. Today they are recognised as an irreplaceable heritage — documented and championed by preservation groups — and a new generation of winemakers treats old-vine Zinfandel with the reverence Europe reserves for its grand crus.⁵ They are, quite literally, living history.

White Zinfandel: the accident that saved the old vines

One of the strangest and most consequential twists in Zinfandel’s story came in the 1970s. At Sutter Home, winemaker Bob Trinchero was making a dry pink wine by drawing off juice from his red Zinfandel — until, in 1975, a batch suffered a “stuck fermentation” that left it sweet and blush-pink.⁶ He bottled it anyway, and White Zinfandel — light, sweet, and easy — became a runaway sensation, at one point among the best-selling wines in America.

Wine snobs sneered, but White Zinfandel did something profound: by creating enormous demand for Zinfandel grapes, it made those old vineyards commercially valuable again — and so it saved countless blocks of irreplaceable old-vine Zinfandel that would otherwise have been torn out.⁶ It is one of wine’s great ironies that a simple sweet pink wine preserved some of America’s most serious vineyard heritage for the fine-wine producers of today.

Zinfandel today

Modern Zinfandel is above all a bold, generous red — ripe and jammy, bursting with blackberry and brambly fruit, black pepper, and sweet spice, and often high in alcohol thanks to the grape’s tendency to ripen unevenly to very high sugars.⁷ From easygoing crowd-pleasers to profound old-vine bottlings, it spans an enormous range, and it remains a fixture of California’s identity, celebrated each year by devotees of the grape.

It also wears its international identity openly: American producers may now label the wine “Primitivo,” and its shared heritage with Italy and Croatia is a point of pride rather than confusion. From an ancient Croatian vine nearly lost in its homeland to the signature grape of California, Zinfandel is proof that a grape, like a people, can find a whole new life in America — and that the story of American wine is, at heart, a story of immigrants.

Keep exploring American wine

• Sonoma — home to some of California’s greatest old-vine Zinfandel.
• California Wine — the state that made Zinfandel its own.
• American Wine: The Complete History — the national story Zinfandel helped write.

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

Wine Grapes

Robinson, Harding & Vouillamoz

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The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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References & further reading

1. Charles L. Sullivan, Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine (University of California Press, 2003), the definitive history of the grape and the long search for its origins. ↩
2. Carole P. Meredith (UC Davis) with Ivan Pejić and Edi Maletić (University of Zagreb), DNA-profiling research (2001–2004) identifying Zinfandel with Croatia’s Crljenak Kaštelanski / Tribidrag; Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding & José Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes (2012), on the Tribidrag pedigree. ↩
3. Charles L. Sullivan, Zinfandel: A History (UC Press, 2003), on the Schönbrunn collection, George Gibbs, and the grape’s arrival in America; Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America (UC Press, 1989–2005). ↩
4. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 1989), on Zinfandel in Gold Rush California and the nineteenth-century field-blend vineyards. ↩
5. Historic Vineyard Society records; Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Zinfandel” and “old vines.” ↩
6. Charles L. Sullivan, Zinfandel: A History (UC Press, 2003), and Sutter Home / Trinchero Family Estates records on the origin of White Zinfandel (1975). ↩
7. Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding & José Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes (Allen Lane / Ecco, 2012), the entry on Zinfandel / Primitivo / Tribidrag and its winemaking. ↩