Other Cool Zinfandel Sites

The Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP!) is probably the number one promoter of Zinfandels today. This group may have been responsible to the sudden re-emergence in interest in these wines. Lists pretty much every winery that makes Zin. Good newsletter.

The Zin Zealot is a site that promotes the Zinfandels of Sonoma County. Includes great databases of award winning wines along with an excellent selection of reviews. Recently updated this site has the best links for Zin on the web. Highly recommended.

Quartery Logo Justin Christoph is the wine critic for the Philadelphia Sun and a Zin lover. He puts up this website of reviews. I'm guessing that you'll be able to get some early heads-up recommendations on here.

This page from Silver Spirits has some Parker numbers of interest.

This is a Frank Southerland column done for Gannett News services where he extols the virtues of Zinfandel. Includes some recent tasting notes

Meanwhile, James Laube writes this excellent backgrounder on current Zinfandel styles with and overview of the 1995 Zins. There are some useful tasting notes and an utterly idiotic vintage guide to California Zins which has to be as useless as wings on a goat. Obviously the vintage guide was just done to fill space on an otherwise outstanding MUST READ article.

More than a few wine stores pride themselves with their Zin collections. Here is the "Zinventory" at Solano Cellars in Berkeley. Includes promotional wine tasting notes of little value.

The Wine Rave is a wild self-congratulatory Gen-X community input wine tasting database which suffers from the "democratic" nature of the evaluations; Not to mention the inexperience of the Gen-X crowd and its orientation towards the low-budget items. Everyone with an opinion, no matter how perverse, chimes in, making the recommendations dubious at best.

The Tasting Room is a good idea that just doesn't seem to perform as well as it should. The reviews, which seem to catch many of the best wines also misses a lot of excellent wine and drops the ball too often. Obviously not all the tasters are on the same page insofar as their palates are concerned. I'm not looking for a committee's consensus when it comes to good wine.