Before I go any further, I need to deal with a potentially awkward issue.

I like the blush wine marketed as "white Zinfandel." I even like the sweet Sutter Home White Zinfandel. You may now commence mocking my barbaric and loutish taste. You likely already know that White Zinfandel isn't really white. Technically it's a blush wine, made from red Zinfandel grapes. It's not really a "new" variety of wine; it is more than anything else a matter of branding, good marketing and a winemaker with an eye for serendipity.

White Zinfandel is very much associated with California wine, and most of all, with Sutter Home. In 1972 wine maker Bob Trinchero of Sutter Home, in an effort to increase the tannins and deepen the color of his Deaver Vineyard Zinfandel, drained some juice from the vats (this process is referred to as saignée). Because this method reduces the contact between the juice and the crushed skins, there's far less color, and a very different taste. Trinchero finished the wine as a dry wine, and attempted to sell it with a label bearing the name Oeil de Perdrix, inspired by a French wine produced using saignée. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms objected, and required an English translation. Trinchero, rather than actually translating the phrase, came up with "White Zinfandel," and put that on the label instead.

Trinchero's "new" wine did surprisingly well. Other producers, knowing that white wine was outselling red (this was in the '70s!), followed suit with other wines. In 1975, Trinchero noticed that his White Zinfandel was suffering "stuck fermentation," that is, the yeast responsible for fermenting the juice had all died off, but it had died before all the sugar in the naturally very sweet Zinfandel juice had been converted to alcohol. This left Trinchero with a sweeter than usual wine. He set it aside to rest for two weeks, and then tried it again. This time, he decided to to sell the darker pink and sweeter than usual Zinfanel.

Trinchro's slightly sweeter wine was an almost immediate success, and pretty much put Sutter Home at the head of the California White Zinfandel line. From that point on, the sweet blush wine made huge inroads in terms of climbing the charts for consumer table wine and "jug wine." Sutter Home still dominates the White Zinfandel market, though Beringer and other California "jug" wine (and box wine) producers are following in Sutter Home's footsteps. I've noticed that marketing departments are now increasingly reserving "blush" for White Zinfandel, and similarly produced wines, and moving to "rose" (yes, rosé sans acute accent) for wines that might be referred to as "blush." Sutter Home and a number of other "table wine" producers are using essentially the same process with Merlot and other red wines.