Zinfandel Grape

Zinfandel has one of the most genuinely remarkable, scientifically-resolved origin stories of any grape variety grown in America, often called "America's Grape" for having formed the basis of the country's first true commercial wine industry, despite ultimately being a European transplant. For most of the 20th century its true origin was a real, unresolved mystery: it was clearly a Vitis vinifera grape, meaning it had to have originated somewhere in Europe, but no historical records of a grape by that name existed there. A USDA researcher first noticed in the late 1960s that Zinfandel closely resembled Primitivo, a grape grown in Italy's Puglia region, but proving an actual genetic connection had to wait for DNA technology. Starting in the 1990s, UC Davis grapevine geneticist Carole Meredith led a real, multi-year international investigation with researchers Ivan Pejic and Edi Maletic at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, confirming by DNA profiling in 1998 that Zinfandel and Primitivo were genetically identical. That still left the deeper question of where the grape had originated before reaching Italy. The real answer came in September 2000, when the Croatian researchers located a single, nearly extinct vine on the island of Kastela, on Croatia's Dalmatian coast, known locally as Crljenak Kastelanski — DNA testing in December 2001 confirmed it as a genetic match. Later historical research traced the grape's documented use back even further, to a 1444 church record in Vodice, Croatia, under the older name Tribidrag. The same grape is also grown in Montenegro under the name Kratosija. Real, poignant context: most of Croatia's own historic Zinfandel-family vines had been wiped out by the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century, meaning California's own plantings, descended from vines imported decades earlier, ended up helping preserve genetic material that had nearly disappeared in the grape's actual homeland.