The only (non-white) Zinfandel in town

I finally got around to trying the only Zin in the Whitehorse Liquor Store. The Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi 2002 Zinfandel is about $15 and is a nice, basic Zinfandel from California. Medium bodied, it has lots of nice berry flavours, a little oaky spice and woodsiness. Would be good for barbeques with burgers. If you like Australian Shiraz, you should like this wine as it is juicy and very friendly to drink. It is not a great wine, but is perfectly good for a casual dinner. If you've never had Zinfandel before, give it a try, but be aware that if you spent double to triple the price of this wine on a good bottle of Zin in a liquor store down south, you would get something much better, so don't judge the varietal by this one wine. It is fine for a cheap wine, but by no means fabulous.

Just a little blurb on Zinfandel: Zinfandel is a grape that was established in California over 100 years ago and although some other wine regions are starting to produce wines from this grape due to its popularity, California is by far the main producer. Inniskillin Okanagan is so far the only BC winery that makes a Zin, and I think there might be a couple being produced in Ontario. I believe the vines are quite sensitive to cold, so it doesn't have much potential for Canadian wine production.

For many years it was unknown where Zinfandel originated. It was found to be genetically the same as the Primitivo grape from Italy and for a while was presumed to have come from there, but it has since been discovered that the grapes used in Italy and California were both brought independently to those places from Croatia (although there is still some dispute about all this). So they are more like descendants of the same vines, rather than Zinfandel being a descendant of Primitivo. I believe there is a Primitivo in the Italian section of the Whitehorse liquor store, which I am meaning to try sometime.