Primitivo vs. Zinfandel

My colleague was nice enough to pick me up a bottle of some fine Californian Zinfandel (In Italy Zinfandel is known as Primitivo) on his last trip to the US. I regret not appreciating wine more before I left the US. Californian wines are expensive to begin with, and if you do happen to find them in Italy then they cost twice as much as they do in the US. Plus, due to what is available in Italy it does not make much sense to buy a US wine. That said, I really enjoyed This one was St Francis Winery's Old Vines Zinfandel.

Zinfandel has supposedly been genetically proven to be the long lost American cousin of the Italian Primitivo Varietal, a grape native to the Apulia region of Southern Italy. Just because I like to do things like this, I went out an bought an Italian Primitivo so I could do some comparing. I grabbed a bottle of Soloperto Primitivo di Manduria DOC off the shelf and brought both wines home to decant. It is fair to say that the Italian Primitivo, being from 1997, might have been at a bit of an advantage, but I put them both to the test. The wines were really similar in consistency. Both were peppery and fruity, and went very well with pan-seared steak and oven roasted potatoes. The Zinfandel was sweeter and stronger, and the Primitivo was more acidic. Both were very good and I will certainly be drinking them again.

I recently watched the documentary Mondovino. It was a little slow and boring, but it had some interesting comparisons of the new school and old school wine industry. The director would go back and forth between little old peasant winemakers and younger "wine-consultants" decked out in Armani suits and driving around in expensive cars. Of course, I agree with the idea that quality is lost on all things mass-produced, but at the same time we cannot deny that technology has helped the winemaking industry enormously. Multi-billionaire wine producer Robert Mondavi was portrayed as the evil American plotter set out to "Cocacola-ize" wine. He was of course helped by the even more evil enologist Michel Rolland and the famous American wine critic Robert Parker. The director did a good job of pointing out how the world may be in danger of fat cats set out to create un-unlikeable sweet vanilla oaky wines because of the sinister collaboration between these 3 individuals. One buys up land, 1 "makes" the wine, and the other writes favorably about it, knowing that the combination of these actions is bound to generate billions in sales. It was funny how a small French town resisted Mondavi's billion dollar takeover of their land to preserve their wine-making traditions.