(Wine Searcher) - What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than with a selection of true-blue American classics?

Happy birthday, USA, you're looking great for 242 years old.

Today being the day that Americans come together to forget their differences and celebrate their shared heritage, we were casting about for some really US-centric story ideas. Rewrite a story about wines from the original 13 colonies? Too easy. Write a piece about the most popular wines from each state? Too long. But a story about the most US wine grape variety of them all? Sounds just right.

Zinfandel arrived in California from Europe sometime in the 19th Century, but that's really all we can say for certain. Where it came from is shrouded in both mystery and history; the chances are it arrived from Italy, under the name Primitivo, but it could possibly have arrived via another route and under a different name. We don't even know where the word Zinfandel comes from.