White Zinfandel: How It's Made, Sweetness and Food

White Zinfandel is a pink, lightly sweet wine made from the red Zinfandel grape. The “white” is misleading: it is a rosé, or blush wine, that gets its pale pink color from brief contact with the dark grape skins. Sutter Home describes strawberry and melon flavors, and the wine is noticeably sweet and low in alcohol. It is a good fit if you find dry wines too sharp, and one of the better wines for spicy food.

What White Zinfandel is

Zinfandel is a red grape, best known in California for big, high-alcohol reds. White Zinfandel takes the same grape and makes a completely different wine. Wikipedia describes it as a rosé that falls between off-dry and sweet, and notes that its blush color comes from the fact that it is not made from white grapes. Wine Folly’s Zinfandel guide adds that a rare white mutation of the grape exists, but White Zinfandel itself is pink.

Wine Folly’s rosé guide calls it one of the most popular rosés sold in the US by volume, though it is quick to add that popularity is not the same as quality.

	White Zinfandel
Grape	Zinfandel (a red grape)
Color	Pale pink
Sweetness	Off-dry to sweet
Alcohol	About 9.5–9.8% for Sutter Home, per Target’s listing
Typical flavors	Strawberry, raspberry, cherry, melon, citrus
Serve	Ice cold

How it’s made

Like other rosés, White Zinfandel starts with red grapes whose juice is separated from the skins early, before it turns red. Sutter Home says Bob Trinchero made the first one by saignée (“bleeding”): draining off some free-run juice from crushed Zinfandel to concentrate the red wine left in the tank, then fermenting that pale juice on its own.

The sweetness comes from what happens next. Yeast turns grape sugar into alcohol, and Wine Folly explains that sweet wines can be made by stopping fermentation early, for example by chilling or filtering the wine. The sugar that is left behind is called residual sugar. Because less sugar has become alcohol, wines made this way also tend to be lower in alcohol.

The Sutter Home story

The modern style was born at Sutter Home Winery in California. The timeline below is from Sutter Home’s own history page:

• 1890: Sutter Home Winery is founded. It closes during Prohibition.
• 1948: The Trinchero family, who left New York City for California in December 1947, reopens the winery.
• 1972: Bob Trinchero drains free-run juice from Amador County Zinfandel and ferments it to dryness. The result is the first Sutter Home White Zinfandel: dry and white in color, 220 cases.
• 1975: The 1974 White Zinfandel suffers a “stuck” fermentation, one that stops before the yeast finishes. The wine ends up light pink with about 2% residual sugar. Customers love it, and it becomes the first Sutter Home wine to sell out each year.
• 1987: White Zinfandel becomes the best-selling premium wine in the US. Sales grew from 25,000 cases in 1981 to more than 4.5 million.

Wine Folly tells the same story more briefly, saying the style began in the 1970s, reportedly by accident, when a stalled fermentation left sugar that hid bitterness and won over customers. Sutter Home still sells the wine today, and Wikipedia cites AC Nielsen data for the 52 weeks ending January 2018 that gave Sutter Home 29.1% of total White Zinfandel dollar sales and 73.1% of sales in the small 187 mL bottle size.

The wine also helped the red grape. Wine Folly notes that White Zinfandel’s popularity kept demand up for Zinfandel grapes, which may have helped save some of California’s old Zinfandel vineyards. In our view, that is the best argument for giving White Zinfandel some credit, even if you prefer a dry pink.

How sweet is White Zinfandel?

Sutter Home describes its White Zinfandel as “deliciously sweet”, with strawberry and melon, and uses the tagline “refreshingly sweet”. Target’s product listing labels the style demi-sec and calls it lightly sweet. Wine Folly puts most White Zinfandel in the off-dry range and describes strawberry, cotton candy and lemon flavors with moderately high acidity.

To put the 1975 figure in context: 2% residual sugar is about 20 grams of sugar per liter. Under European labeling terms for still wine, “dry” allows up to 4 grams per liter (9 with high acidity), “medium dry” up to 12 grams (18 with high acidity) and “medium” up to 45 grams. Wine Folly notes that noticeably sweet wines start at around 35 grams per liter. Sutter Home doesn’t publish a residual sugar figure for the current wine on its product page, so treat the 1975 number as a historical guide, not a spec.

White Zinfandel vs dry rosé

	White Zinfandel	Dry rosé
Grapes	Zinfandel	Many red grapes, including Pinot Noir and Sangiovese
Classic examples	Sutter Home and other California brands	Provence rosé, Tavel
Sweetness	Off-dry to sweet	Dry
Style (Wine Folly)	Strawberry, cotton candy, lemon	Fresh and crisp (Provence) to dry and savory
Our pick to pair	Spicy food, sweet-and-sour dishes	Salads, seafood, grilled chicken

Wine Folly’s rosé guide describes Provence rosé as fresh, crisp and dry, and Tavel as an unusually dry rosé. If you like White Zinfandel and want to try a drier pink, we’d step over to a Spanish Garnacha rosé or a California rosé of Grenache before going all the way to a pale Provence bottle.

Food pairing

Wine Folly’s one pairing tip for White Zinfandel is to serve it ice cold, “perhaps with Thai food”. Sutter Home’s own page says it goes with everything from spicy to sweet, and from salads to fish and meat, and links to a creamy Cajun chicken pasta recipe.

Our picks:

• Spicy food. Thai curries, Sichuan noodles, Nashville hot chicken, Cajun dishes. In our view, a little sweetness and low alcohol make chili heat feel gentler.
• Sweet-and-sour and barbecue. Sugary sauces tend to make a dry wine seem thin and tart, so a wine with some sweetness of its own is the safer choice.
• Fruit and light desserts. Strawberry shortcake, fruit salad or a fruit tart, as long as the dessert isn’t sweeter than the wine.
• Picnic food. Ham sandwiches, chicken salad, deviled eggs.

We’d avoid pouring it with a big steak or a bitter green salad. Wine and food that pull in opposite directions rarely flatter each other. For more matching ideas, see our wine and food pairing guide.

How to serve it

Serve White Zinfandel well chilled, straight from the fridge, as Wine Folly suggests. A standard white wine glass works. It is sold in small and large formats; Sutter Home lists minis, a “Twist & Go” size, 750 mL bottles and 1.5-liter magnums. The small bottles are handy if you only want a glass or two. Once opened, keep the bottle in the fridge with a stopper. Our guide to how long wine lasts after opening covers how many days you can expect.

Note: “White Zinfandel” on a label names a pink wine style, not a white grape. If sweetness matters to you, check the back label or the producer’s website before you buy.