America’s most popular pink wine started out as a bump in the road to a better red. It was the early ‘70s and a new crop of California winemakers was branching out from cheap jug wines and staking a claim to quality.
One of those winemakers was Bob Trinchero of the Sutter Home winery who had produced an Amador County Red Zinfandel that got critics' and wine-lovers' attention.
Looking to improve the wine, Trinchero decided to bleed off some of the juice from the tank at the beginning of fermentation, a process known as saignée. Since even red grape juice is white—the color comes from contact with the skins—removing some of the juice is a way to concentrate the flavor and color of the remaining wine.
By the end of harvest, Trinchero had about 550 gallons of leftover white juice from the process which he planned to put in the winery's Chablis blend. But Darrell Corti, a well-known Sacramento gourmet grocer and wine merchant and friend of the family, stepped in. Bottle the stuff and I'll sell half of it, he offered.
Corti suggested selling the wine under the label “Oeil de Perdix," which means eye of the partridge in French. That turned out to be a problem for government regulators, who said the name couldn't run without an accompanying translation, so Trinchero added “White Zinfandel" to the label.
The first few vintages were white and dry. Then came what the winery calls the “fortuitous accident" of 1975.
Due to a few miscalculations, Trinchero ended up with a “stuck" fermentation, in which the yeast die before converting all the sugar to alcohol. Not only that, efforts to fix the problem resulted in a wine that turned out to be light pink.
A slightly sweet, pink wine, Trinchero wondered—what to do with that? He decided to bottle it and see what happened.
The result was a runaway success.
Bottles flew out of the tasting room and in the ensuing years sales shot up from the tens of thousands to the millions. The “Oeil de Perdix" name was dropped and Sutter Home White Zinfandel became the number one varietal wine, a spot it held for years before being replaced by Chardonnay.
Meanwhile, Sutter Home was transformed from a small mom-and-pop operation to a major force in the industry.
Today, Sutter Home has sold $6 billion worth of Sutter Home original White Zinfandel, says Brie Baltzell, senior marketing manager for Sutter Home. “White Zinfandel remains a hugely important segment of the American wine market today and is still the way in which many discover wine," she adds.
Frankly fruity and uncomplicated, white zin is sometimes dismissed by critics as a less than “serious" wine. But many in the industry recognize the role white zin has played both in introducing wine to a new audience and in helping preserve the state's Zinfandel vineyards, which had been in danger of being ripped out in favor of varieties such as Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.
In 1994, Wine Spectator magazine gave Sutter Home a Distinguished Service Award for “having introduced more Americans to wine on the table than anyone in history." And a bottle of Sutter Home White Zin is on display in the Smithsonian.
Sutter Home today is now part of a larger portfolio under Trinchero Family Estates, still family-owned, that boasts a sizable portfolio of wines. But the Sutter Home White Zin remains popular, selling more than 300 million cases a year.
Fun fact: Roughly one of every 25 bottles of wine sold in retail is White Zinfandel, says Baltzell.
This is one goof that turned out just grand.
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