Wine writer RICHARD CALVER tracks the progress of a humble Croatian to being the premier grape of California.

FINISHING the week with a visit to the French Flair cellar door in Manuka and then having a good red with some Italian food at Antica Ricetta next door was a pleasant end to a rather hectic work schedule.  

This mix of locale is a celebration of the two European cultures and their food and wine, and provides a glimpse into other worlds that is comforting to embrace during an increasingly inhospitable Canberra winter.  

At French Flair we tasted four wines on offer with the standout being the Beaujolais, the 2019 Domaine Des Bonnetieres. This is a one hundred per cent Gamay red, a fruit-driven, easy drinking wine that was gone in a flash. Beguiling, just as is the tradition in November of each year to await the latest vintage of Beaujolais and to enter into the frenzy of purchase and drinking that hails this popular wine. One website tells me that 22 million bottles a year are exported from this extraordinarily prolific region. 

In a few small steps, we enter the renovated Antica Ricetta and order pasta dishes and a bottle of Pasqua Desire Lush & Zin Primitivo Puglia 2020. 

For a young wine it had good colour and a finish that got better with air.  It is a quaffer, retailing generally at around $23-$25, marked up to $45 in the restaurant. It was a good counterpoint to the burnt butter and sage sauce that covered the gnocchi I ordered with the complementarity of the different flavours evident.

The name is a hoot. Primitivo is known as zinfandel in California in particular, where it is recognised as an excellent red-wine grape.  The “zin” in the name of our chosen dinner wine is a nod to this collision, and its similarity to the word “sin” is emphasised in the label art with the nomenclature expressed as if a tattoo on the back of a redheaded woman in a black dress. 

Like many a bottle of wine, it sparks an interesting narrative. The story of how this grape variety spread across the world is fascinating, as the variety apparently derives from Croatia where it is known as the Tribidrag grape.  

A priest in the 18th century liked the Croatian grape variety sufficiently that he planted vines in his homeland in Italy, Liponti.  Because the grapes matured first, they were called “primitivo” which means the “first one” and the name stuck.

The route from Croatia to the US was in the early 19th century where a Boston horticulturalist, George Gibbs, had received the grape via Vienna. 

Here the Hapsburg emperor reigned and that royal family had adopted the grape and the pleasant wine that it produced. Gibbs used the variety as a table grape which he named zenfendal, a resemblance to its Hungarian Hapsburg derived name tzinifándli.  Gibbs and his vines followed the gold rush to California in 1850. There the variety became zinfandel, and was planted as a wine grape in 1857. It has been California’s most populous grape ever since.  

The fact that the varieties are the same was discovered by a US professor in 1967 when he visited Puglia (the region from whence our dinner wine came) and his instinct that the similarities were more than coincidence was proven in 1968. 

The final piece of the puzzle was put in place by other academics who, using research from the ’60s and the ’90s, pinpointed the originating grape on the Dalmatian coast.  

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”

–Will and Ariel Durant