Zinfandel. The other early varietal to be planted in Calaveras County, Zinfandel, was imported to Long Island by George Gibbs, probably in 1829 from the Imperial Nursery in Vienna, Austria. The first account of the name, however, did not occur until 1831, when Bostonian Samuel Perkins began selling it as Zenfendel. By 1833 several growers in Boston had the vine, now called Zinfandal by its leading nurseryman Charles M. Hovey (perhaps a relative of our own Chuck Hovey?).
By the late 1830s Zinfandel had become a popular table grape in New England, and was later discovered in California to be identical to the New England Black St. Peter’s grape. When gold was discovered on the American River in January of 1848, hordes of argonauts from every country on the globe poured into California in what has been called the greatest mass migration in human history. The first to arrive in California, the 48ers, were miners from Mexico, Chile, and other countries south of the border, and it appears likely that the grapes they brought with them were the Mission variety. By 1849, however, many New Englanders had arrived in California. With a passion for horticulture, they evidently brought the Zinfandel grape to California.
During the 1850s several vineyardists in San Jose, Stockton, and Sacramento were importing Zinfandel in shipments of vines from New England. By the late 1860s Zinfandel was being grown all over northern California. In the great wine boom of the 1880s, it was the most widely planted vine, but by the turn of the nineteenth century was no longer the most popular but still one of the most common wine grapes in the state. Mostly, however, it was blended with Petite Sirah and Carignanc to produce ordinary Clarets and burgundies. During Prohibition home winemaking and wines for sacramental use were legal and it was one of the favorites shipped east. After repeal, Zinfandel continued to be used primarily as a blending wine, until the 1960s when the revolution in American wine consumption occurred. At this time, its potential as a fine table wine was being discovered from the California foothills, primarily in Amador County.
As for the varietal, no vine of the Zinfandel name ever existed in the Old World. Recent DNA studies, however, have determined that the Primitivo, common in Southern Italy, and the Zinfandel were identical. Others believe that the vine known as Plavac Mali, a dark grape grown in Croatia on the Adriatic is the same, but the DNA examinations have left some doubt. The vines are, however, probably closely related. As much of northern Italy and all of Croatia were part of the Austrian Empire, from whose capital, Vienna, George Gibbs imported his dark grape to Long Island in 1829, Zinfandel can do doubt trace its origins to that region 1(407-411).
- A Companion to California Wine, and Encyclopedia of Wine and Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present,
Sullivan, Charles L.
, Berkeley and Los Angeles, (1998)
