White Zinfandel

White Zinfandel, often abbreviated as White Zin, is a dry to sweet, pink-colored rosé. White Zinfandel is made from the Zinfandel wine grape, which would otherwise produce a bold and spicy red wine. White Zinfandel is not a grape variety but a method of processing Zinfandel grapes. As of February 2006, White Zinfandel accounted for 10% of all wine sold by volume, making it the third most popular varietal in the United States, outselling Red Zinfandel 6:1 by volume.

Zinfandel was first made into a rosé wine in 1869 by the El Pinal Winery in Lodi, California. The resulting wine was thought of highly enough that California viticultural commissioner Charles Wetmore, the later founder of Cresta Blanca Winery, advocated Zinfandel's use as a white wine grape.

In the 1970s Sutter Home Winery was a producer of premium Zinfandel red wine in the Napa Valley. To increase concentration in their wines, they used the saignée technique to bleed off some of the grape juice before fermentation, to increase the impact of compounds in the skins on the remaining wine. The excess juice was separately fermented into a dry, almost white wine that Sutter Home called "White Zinfandel."

In 1975, Sutter Home's White Zinfandel experienced a "stuck fermentation", a problem that occurs when the yeast dies out before consuming all of the sugar. This problem juice was set aside. Some weeks later the winemaker tasted it, and preferred this accidental result, which was a sweet pink wine. This is the style that became popular and today is known as White Zinfandel, but in the early days was known as Cabernet Blanc. Sutter Home realized they could sell far more White Zinfandel than anything they had produced to date, and gradually became a successful producer of inexpensive wines. They remain one of the biggest producers of the wine, with annual shipments of over 4 million cases.

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