Frog's Leap Winery

No wine is more beloved, more treasured, more celebrated or more often drank at Frog’s Leap than Zinfandel. We often even have it in our coffee cups in the morning (we call it ‘red coffee’!). We’ve been making Zinfandel since our inception and we take enormous pleasure in opening bottles dating back 20 or even 30 years...still glorious in their development. But let us be clear, we are talking about our kind of Zinfandel... Frog’s Leap Zinfandel: balanced, restrained, nuanced, subtle, and almost always under 14% alcohol. If you are looking for a Zin to serve with wooly mammoth, or to put hair on your chest, you’ve come to the wrong place. Those styles are for lesser vineyards and less seasoned winemaking. To make Zinfandel in the highest form takes great attention to detail in the growing, a constant vigilance during harvest and great care in the cellar. And it takes blending. Nay, not blending but co-fermentation. The secret to Frog’s Leap Zinfandels (once you get past the 40 year old dry farmed, perfectly situated vineyards) is that at the same time we harvest the Zin, we also harvest plantings of Petite sirah, Carignan, and Valdique and ferment them all in the same tank at the same time. This allows us to get the zinfandel grapes fully ripe, full of sugar and flavor and then using the other less sweet varietals to add color, flavor nuance while they reduce the overall alcohol content (think about it). Aged for 14 months in primarily American oak (very little new), the wine gains its strength through complexity and character rather than brute alcoholic strength.