Wither* ZAP?
Who am I to put the kibosh on a party, especially one that by all measures has been a resounding success?

Nevertheless, I have had enough of Zinfandel and its party.

The trade and media gather at Fort Mason

before the Zin-crazed public descends.

Sixteen years ago, in the small firehouse space at Fort Mason in San Francisco, a nascent organization called Zinfandel Advocates & Producers (http://www.zinfandel.org/), or what’s become affectionately known as “ZAP,” launched a modest event. It sought to bring together the producer and consumer in appreciation for the nobility of wines made from the Zinfandel grape. There were only a handful of producers participating in the inaugural, including the “Rs” Ravenswood, Ridge, Rosenblum, and the newly coined Renwood –with about equal parts consuming public. It was a low-key and informal soirée, with good food and wine proliferating. It was if we were all part of a not-so-secret society. This was at a time when the majority of those who drank Zinfandel, drank it pink and cold, like soda pop. All, except for those who had cultivated an appreciation for wines that sprang from dry-farmed, age-challenged vines, from venerable head-pruned vineyards that often had interspersed among the Zin such heritage varietals as Petite Sirah, Carignan, Alicante Bouchet, among other obscure grapes that defied identification—as this was before the advent of DNA fingerprinting.

Wine wonks readily acknowledge “white” Zinfandel as the product that saved the grape and many of those old vineyards and fueled what amounts to a two-decade Renaissance for the “red” version of the wine. Ramping off that fervor, the annual event known in shorthand as “ZAP,” now entails four days of activities and culminated in the 16th Annual Tasting on January 27th, the Superbowl of Zin. Despite the couple of hundred wineries occupying two large, covered piers of Fort Mason, and a rumored 10,000 consumers, trade, and media participating, it left me wondering whether ZAP and Zin itself has peaked. Last year was the first since the event’s inception that I made other plans and decided not to go. It was over the top, particularly for this borderline claustrophobic. This year, I reluctantly agreed to tag along with a buddy who has more than 20 years of garage-rendered Zin to his name and has written extensively about the grape and its phenomenal appeal. Both of us left rather abruptly and with mixed emotions.

While I admire the organizers, respect the winemakers, and appreciate the volunteers who make the impressive ZAP happen (some of my best friends are winemakers and ZAP volunteers) I have lost interest in the event, and sadly, for the wine itself. This is a hard confession to make, as it was Zin that introduced me to the world-of-wine back in the late 70s. But that was then.

My gripe now with Zin stems from the homogenization of the product to favor the lowest common denominator of the consumer palate. Bolstered by the popularity of oak- and fruit-dominated Chardonnays and Merlots, the producers of these California wines have seemingly assumed the mantra of “bigger is better.” The Zinfandel grape is happy to oblige. However, a 16 percent alcohol wall-o-wine doesn’t necessarily make for a food-friendly beverage, unless you are seeking a port-substitute for your cheese course.

It’s not that I am a prude, lightweight, or wine-tasting neophyte. Several years running I judged at county fair competitions, evaluating a few hundred different wines before lunch. Any reasonable wine critic would tell you that this process is suboptimal and hardly does the wines (especially after several successive flights) justice.

I’m not sure if there is a better way to evaluate the growing panoply of wines. But I left ZAP this year reinforced in my thinking that it is not a tasting so much as a social event—which is fine, but these wines don’t show well even in this context. I tried the Zin Zone—the quiet, upstairs venue made available to the media, where each producer leaves a bottle enabling a discrete sampling and evaluation without the opportunity for awkward interaction with winery staff or the winemaker.

Still, plowing through a line-up of the latest offerings is simply daunting because of the magnitude of extract and ethanol, care of exuberant winemakers harnessing the potential of California’s favorable climate and vintages.

I did find that those with a little more bottle age on them opens a window into what the grape has to offer. After a sufficient bludgeoning, I considered tracking down a graduated cylinder to dilute the thick fruit, oak, and ethanol punch with water to see whether that would yield more identifiable and describable qualities. I rely on such descriptors to establish the wine in context—to suss out its sense of place—particularly the characters associated with what we know as terroir. In the end, I didn’t. I just gave up. My booklet blank save for a few random scribbles.

The popularity of Zin may well have triggered its own downfall. A winemaking friend poured me two of their three selections named after the Italian families that planted the grapes several generations ago. With a grimace, he said that there won’t be any more of those particular wines because the grapes are slated to be (or had already been) torn up to make way for subdivisions, or more productive, more disease resistant stock.

With the loss of distinctive fruit and increasing reliance on younger, more homogeneous vines, winemakers are becoming more like chemical engineers, instead of the folkloric stewards of the delicate dance between yeast, sugar, acid, and alcohol. For many of these individuals and families, love of the wine had open the doors to this enriching hobby, from which businesses were then conceived. However, the need for their businesses (no longer hobbies) to be profitable compels them to employ manufacturing processes akin in sophistication to those used in pharmaceutical production, which, in turn, adds overhead to the operation and dollars to the price of a bottle of the finished product. Too much alcohol or volatile acidity? No problem, just run it through a reverse osmosis filtration system.
I don’t want to drink flawed wines. But I also don’t want to drink generic wines or those that offer little distinction beyond their heft. “Head-bangers,” a friend called them. HBs. At ZAP (and common to most tasting venues), what one person may perceive as a flaw or at least distraction—such as too much alcohol, VA, or oak—is what another palate may praise. And after tasting several dozen of these HBs, it’s the bigger, hotter, oakier wines that manage to register a blip on the overwhelmed sensory system.

Under the circumstances, it doesn’t take long for even the most seasoned palate to fatigue. Such was my condition at ZAP. Even with scrupulous spitting (into the plastic sports cup that I rigged up to a lanyard around my neck—thus avoiding that embarrassing splash-back phenomenon from the communal spit-bucket) and liberal water rinses and bites of baguette, I still had a hard time appreciating the field of HBs. If there was a diagnostic trend for those wines I did favor, it tended to be the blends, those with even as little as ten percent Petite or Carignan, making for a more interesting and approachable wine.

At ZAP, the trade and media participants traditionally have first taste—affording the pros a couple of hours lead-time for thoughtful consideration before the ethanol-hungry public is let loose. But with the burgeoning popularity of the event, what was once an intimate cadre of insiders is now everyone and their cousin. In years past, I made a valiant effort to sample many of the selections from wineries both conspicuous and up-and-coming, A through Z. This year, my interest waned rapidly and I took my spit-cup, stained teeth, and fatigued palate and beat a hasty retreat well before the masses descended.

If you seek to feel at one with an inebriated mass, in the spirit of ZAP, there is another annual tasting, held by the advocates of grapes traditionally cultivated in France’s storied Rhone valley (and now planted throughout California). The Rhone Rangers (http://www.rhonerangers.org) celebrate their tenth year on March 18th with the “San Francisco Grand Tasting” at Fort Mason. There will be some familiar names at the Rhone Rangers event. Of the nearly 120 participating wineries in RR, many also produce Zinfandel and participate in ZAP. Unlike the relentless red wave at ZAP, Rhone Rangers features whites and reds, drawing from more than a dozen different grape varieties (predominately Marsanne, Roussane, and Viognier for the whites and Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre, in the reds).

The mass appeal of these events would seem to benefit both winery (with exposure that may lead to sales) and (partying) consumer. While I am reluctant to begrudge a good thing for the economy (and my friends’ businesses) I will simply follow the lead of one of our nation’s great statesmen, Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra, who allegedly said, “No one goes there anymore –it’s too crowded.”

And if the bottom falls out of the market, and inventory starts to stall on the pallet, wineries can follow the buzz of the emerging biofuels bandwagon and the French who have begun to turn their glut of Côte du Rhône into ethanol to power tractors.

* 1 : to become dry and sapless; especially : to shrivel from or as if from loss of bodily moisture
2 : to lose vitality, force, or freshness
(thanks, Merriam-Webster: http://www.m-w.com)