Primitivo and zinfandel are essentially the same grape. They derive from a Croatian variety called tribidrag. Over the centuries, Tribidrag descendants have naturally developed their own identity. As a grape and as a wine. - TEXT MAGDA VAN DER RIJST
Tribidrag
The primal mother of primitivo and zinfandel
Battles are fought over everything, including the origin of a grape variety. The search for the ancestors of primitivo and zinfandel reads like The name of the rose by Umberto Eco. True, it involved fewer murders and bloody beatings between the clergy of the time, but collecting clues and deciphering and recording, in this case the grape DNA, took years to penetrate deeper into its origins. In Wine Grapes a detailed description of that search, including a family tree.
Primativus
They write, based partly on written evidence, that the primitivo was spotted as early as 1799. In those days at the turn of the century, the priest of Gioia del Colle in Puglia found a strange grape among the other plants in his garden. That grape betrayed itself by being ripe earlier than the rest. That is why the priest called it primativo, derived from the Latin primativus, which stands for something like 'the first to ripen'. Thanks to that early ripening, the grape easily formed a lot of sugar and that combined with other qualities earned it a permanent place in plantings in southern Italy. Primativo was seen as a local variety or more powerfully expressed: local speciality.
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