Zinfandel: The big, red Valentine wine

Hearty, fruit-packed zin should be a perfect match for romance By Jon Bonné

It is big, deep red, packed with fruit, hearty and soft-edged and meant for sheer pleasure. Zinfandel should be the perfect Valentine’s wine.

“Should,” you ask?

In theory, zin is custom-tailored not only for a day devoted to romance, but one in the midst of a chilly, dark month that begs for warmth and heat. (Mind you, we’re talking about the red stuff. White zin has its place, but pink and indecisively sweet is the sort of Valentine’s Day we left behind in first grade, along with those oddly inappropriate A-Team “Be Mine” cards and flimsy construction-paper mailboxes.)

Yet finding good zinfandel is more of a challenge than it should be. Our recent tasting of over 40 California zinfandels yielded few worthy contenders, and too many wines that smelled alcoholic, lifeless or just plain faulty.

Some of this may be the result of a $25 price cap, though as one friend recently quipped, “Shouldn’t all zins be under $25?” For a Valentine wine, zinfandel seems to have a cruel side. Whether that’s ironically appropriate, I leave to you.

By its nature, zinfandel embraces traits that kill other wines. It revels in big, hearty gobs of fruit flavor, chiseled with earthy tones; my Platonic zin template is the aroma of ripe plums rolled in fine, dry dust.

While most other wines can be beaten into submission by high alcohol levels, zinfandel grapes burst with natural sugar. A 14 percent zin is almost a baseline; while 15 percent frequently signals a wine out of balance, the top zinfandel in our recent tasting clocked in at a head-spinning 15.6 percent. (Hence a side effect for Valentine’s Day: One bottle shared between a happy couple, and your intended could well be tipsy.) While I’d normally champion a red wine at 13.5 percent, the zins we tried at that level were mostly wimpy and watery, like fruit punch for a child who’s being punished.

That wasn’t all. Too many wines had notable faults, as confirmed by pained looks on the faces of my tasters as they slogged through one after another hot, imbalanced bottle — including several with hints of volatile acidity (a smell approximating nail-polish remover) and the lean, pungent scents that indicate incomplete winemaking. These are not the smells to kick off a Valentine’s interlude.

Still others were just plain boring, showing basic fruit flavors but little else to make themselves shine.

Prices gone wild
What’s up? I have one theory. While zinfandel is perhaps the closest thing America has to a native, unhybridized grape variety — even if it’s essentially an identical twin of Europe’s primitivo grape — its pedigree has been rising in recent years. That California has nurtured the market for $75 cult zins is a credit to marketing savvy, if not taste. While some of the best zinfandel makers in the country, including Ridge, Rosenblum and Robert Biale, have kept top prices under $50, it has become harder than it should to find good, enjoyable zin under $15.

After all, zin is meant to be a populist wine — a guilt-free element in a romantic evening of good eating and meaningful looks. To achieve that, you’re going to need a trustworthy wine merchant and a few good recommendations.

We generally found our happiest results in some of California zinfandel’s less known corners — the Sierra Foothills and San Francisco Bay in particular — though good specimens were found from Lodi, Paso Robles and Dry Creek. Napa managed just one spot on our final list, perhaps a reminder that it’s not prime zin territory.

I have a soft spot in my heart for zinfandel, and I’ll look for any excuse to relieve it from its well-worn Thanksgiving duties and assign it to a more appropriate holiday. So I’ll stand by my Valentine recommendation.

Just be sure to choose wisely, and keep a bottle of bubbly on hand to lighten the mood amid all that sultry, heavy red wine.

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