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What is White Zinfandel?
Is it different than Red Zinfandel?
Stay tuned to find out!
What is White Zinfandel?
It's one of the most popular wines, or
was one of the most popular wines
sold in the US for quite some time.
It was actually started by
this company, Sutter Home, back in the 70’s.
Zinfandel is actually a red grape
some people aren't even aware of that, so
I guess the question really should be
what is Red Zinfandel?
It starts as a red grape
it is really hardy, dry
rich red grape.
White Zinfandel
comes from those red grapes
but what they do is the skim off
some of the wine after only a short contact
with the skins of the grapes
exactly like you would make a rose
which we talked about in a previous video.
One of the major differences with White Zinfandel
and Rosés in general
is that White Zinfandel tends to be on the sweeter side.
The story goes that
back in the 70's when Sutter Home was trying to make
a very rich, very dry, deep red Zinfandel
they had the idea to
take some of the juice off of the skins
early on in the process
so that the rest of the juice would be less juice
in contact with more skins
and hopefully producing a deeper, darker, richer
drier red Zinfandel.
When they took some of that juice off
They decided to bottle it as White Zinfandel.
The second kind of
accident they stumbled upon during the process is that
the fermentation didn't fully go through in the White Zinfandel
and the juice that they were selling was White Zinfandel
and it left the wine a little bit sweeter than it should have been.
The yeast usually burns off
the sugars to make alcohol,
but in this case it didn't go all the way through
so it still was a little bit sweet
and people started liking it.
So they started making more.
Other companies jumped in as well and started producing their own
and so a good segment of the wine drinking society of that time and up until recently
wasn't even aware that Red Zinfandel was actually very dark
very rich, dry red wine.
One of the other effects that White Zinfandels had on the American wine consumers
was to kind of change their impressions of what pink wines are traditionally.
French wineries and even a lot of California wineries
for decades before or hundreds of years before
have been producing Rosés, which were the dry pink wines.
Because of the popularity of White Zinfandel in the US
as more and more people became wine drinkers, that was the only pink wine they were familiar with and
they started associating pink wines with sweetness.
So in conclusion of “What is White Zinfandel?”
basically it is a sweet version of the rosé, made out of the Zinfandel grapes.
It is just important to remember that when you walk in to your local wine store
and you ask for a Zinfandel
don't be surprised if the walk you over and show you a dry red wine.
If you want White Zinfandel, make sure to specify the word "white" in front of it!
Thank you very much for watching,
we really appreciate all the views and the comments and feedback that we've been getting.
I look forward to seeing you soon... Cheers!