(LAMag) - Cheap, sweet, and easy to chug. For decades, that’s been the reputation of white zinfandel—the pink-colored “jug wine” for people who don’t really like wine at all.

But does this misnamed style of rosé wine made from zinfandel grapes—which otherwise produce a bold, spicy red wine—really deserve such a bad reputation?

Let’s look back at the history of white zinfandel wine making to see where things went awry.

Zinfandel was first made into a rosé, or blush wine, in 1869 by El Pinal Winery in Lodi. The resulting product was pretty well-regarded, so much so that the California viticultural commissioner of the day advocated the use of zinfandel as a white wine grape as well as a red.

Flash forward to the 1970s, when Sutter Home Winery was producing “premium” Napa Valley zinfandel red wines. The winemakers would usually “bleed off” some of the grape’s excess juice to increase the concentration of tannic compounds on the red wine. This leftover juice would be then fermented in a dry-style wine that was labeled “white zinfandel” (thought it was technically a rosé). Both of these practices were fairly common in the California wine industry at the time.

But in 1975, one batch of white zinfandel didn’t fully ferment by accident, resulting in a lower-alcohol wine with a larger amount of sugar. After sitting around in a jug for a few week, winemakers decided to bottle and sell the sweet stuff anyway. It became an overnight best-seller.   

The rest as they say is history: cheap, sub-$10 bottles of white zin became a cultural staple thorugh the 80s and 90s, oftentimes served on the rocks and colloquially dubbed “Cougar Juice.” It outsold regular Zinfandel 6-to-1 and was at one time the third most-popular wine style in the country by volume. These days the pink stuff still sells around 10 million cases annually. (Ironically, the success of white zin helped save thousands of acres of old-vine zinfandel which would have likely been ripped out).