This weekend, a BFF of mine came through town, which was nice, and she also brought a bottle of wine, which was really nice.
From the very recently erected Trader Joe’s in Asheville, she brought us a 2012 Grifone Primitivo, which is the Italian version of a Zinfandel.
The bottle’s solid orange label (appropriate for impending Halloween, I suppose) declared the Zinfandel/Primitivo “the mystery grape of international viticulture.” This particular Primitivo, grown in Italy’s Puglia region, was promised to be “soft and deep with flavorful vanilla notes and a long finish” — a blurb that might also be useful in describing certain massage parlors.
The Zinfandel is a genetically fascinating grape. Its makeup is all but identical to a couple of Croatian grapes as well as the aforementioned Primitivo. Zinfandel, a clone of the Primitivo, was first grown in the United States in the middle of the 19th century.
This cross-continental grape family has historically been a subject of fierce (fierce for wine people, anyway) legal debate. In 1999, the European Union officially recognized Zinfandel as a synonym for Primitivo, meaning Primitivos sold in American can be labeled Zinfandels and vice versa.
As for the great United States, the jury is still out on the Z/P relationship. It was not until 2007 that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said it was cool to label an American-made wine either a Zinfandel or Primitivo, but it has yet to deem the terms interchangeable.
A proposal to make the terms synonymous in America was made in 2002 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A decision on this proposal has yet to be reached.
But all of this has been a digression. I liked the Grifone Primitivo, especially when I learned that it’d cost a criminal $3.99.
Still, though — this wine can’t be legally labeled another arbitrary word because a couple of U.S. bureaucratic departments have yet to bring an 11-year legal dispute to some sort of conclusion? It seems silly.
