'ZINFANDEL WEEK' AT TRIBECA GRILL
WHILE 70 ZINFANDEL PRODUCERS VISIT NYC APRIL 28 - MAY 2

New York & California, April 2003---To celebrate the visit of 70 California Zinfandel wineries to New York this spring, Tribeca Grill is offering a week of a special prix fixe dinner customized to an assortment of Zinfandels available by the glass.

The 'Zinfandel Week' will run April 28 - May 2, coinciding with the Zinfandel producers' tasting on May 1 at 200 5th Club.

The Tribeca Grill serves dinner from 5:30 until 11:00 p.m. The restaurant is located at 375 Greenwich Street, at the corner of Franklin. To reserve, call 212/941-3900. Tribeca Grill's Wine Director of 12 years, David Gordon, has fashioned a 1600 bottle Grand Award wine list featuring over 80 different Zinfandels, which are a delicious counterpoint to Executive Chef Stephen Lewendowski's full-flavored, robust cuisine. Tribeca Grill opened in 1990 and is owned by Robert DeNiro and several other celebrity investors including Bill Murray, Ed Harris and Christopher Walken. The Managing Partner is Drew Nieporent, whose Myriad Restaurant Group owns and manages 16 restaurants including Nobu, Montrachet, Layla and Rubicon.

For information about buying tickets for the Zinfandel tasting, visit www.zinfandel.org or call 530/274-4900. Profits from this event will support the ongoing research at the Heritage Vineyard, a collection of old-vine Zinfandels maintained by the University of California, Davis. A complete list of the 70 participating wineries can be found at www.zinfandel.org. This same group of wineries will also be traveling to Boston (April 29) and Washington D.C. (April 23 & 24) for similar tastings (further detail at www.zinfandel.org). Tickets are $40.00/person for the public (by mail and $44.00 on line) and $30.00/person for Zinfandel Advocates & Producers members. Tickets are available from www.zinfandel.org or 530/274-4900.

Zinfandel has a unique spot in American cultural history as well as American viticulture. Zinfandel is the only wine grape varietal considered unique to the U.S. by the B.A.T.F. It once was the most widely planted varietal in California. Zinfandel is the most stylistically diverse wine made in the U.S. and possibly in the world. "Zinfandel has no historical stylistic context elsewhere in the world that restricts our winemakers' creativity. Few New World wine regions have had the opportunity to create a new great wine. With other varieties, we have constantly compared our efforts to European standards. Zinfandel gives us an unparalleled opportunity to create unique world-class wines," explains Dr. James Wolpert of the Viticulture & Enology Department at University of California, Davis.

THE HERITAGE VINEYARD
The Heritage Vineyard is an unusual and unprecedented collection of rare and 'famous' Zinfandel vine cuttings from all over California, which now are being cultivated at the University of California, Davis' research vineyard in the Napa Valley. It contains selections from Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Contra Costa, Alameda, San Luis Obispo, San Joaquin, Amador, El Dorado, Lake and Santa Clara (Santa Cruz Mountains) counties as well as the Cucamonga region of Southern California. The selections were taken from vineyards at least 60 years old and older. The Vineyard has been planted keeping in mind that it is both a repository of plant material and a collection of historic material: the vineyard is planted at 6 ft x 8 ft (row x vine) spacing; the vines are head-trained and spur-pruned in the "goblet" shape as they would have been in the nineteenth century.