CALIFORNIA HAS LONG claimed zinfandel as its own – a (possibly) native grape whose bottled issue included, in the 1970s, high-alcohol red wines best suited for drinking with takeout pizza and, in the 1980s, blush wines ("white" zinfandels) that strongly appealed to people who didn't really like wine.

It's been mainly in the last decade that zin has begun to be taken seriously by wine makers and wine drinkers alike. And it's been in the same interval, ironically, that the story of its being native to California has been debunked as myth. That story is ably told by Charles L. Sullivan in Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine (California, $24.95).

Sullivan dispenses with the native-California business straight off. "Zinfindal" was being discussed by viticulturists on the East Coast in the 1820s; there is evidence it had been brought there from Austria. The vine then took to the westward roads in the 1840s, carried by fortune seekers who'd heard tell of gold in California.

But the New World story of zinfandel isn't as compelling as the Old World story, a blend of chance observation, gumshoe detective work in sun-bleached Adriatic locales, and DNA top-gunnery.

"By the late 1980s," Sullivan writes, "Italian viticultural specialists were becoming interested in the question" whether primitivo, a vine long cultivated in Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot), was in fact zinfandel. The vines were considered to be indistinguishable in appearance, and the wines produced from their fruit were also powerfully similar in their bewitching blend of berry flavors and pepperiness.

DNA analysis has proved that zin and primitivo are the same vine. But primitivo is not native to Puglia; as Sullivan suggests, its antecedents can be found on Adriatic islands near Split on the Dalmatian coast. Whether the grape we know as zinfandel originated on those islands is a question we will probably never have an answer for, because cuttings of wine-producing grapes have been moved around the Mediterranean for millennia.

Some years ago, approaching Marseilles by ship, I was struck by the landscape: dry, gravelly hills, with some stubble of chaparral, tumbling nearly straight into the blue water. Greece looks like that, and parts of Spain, and Israel too. No doubt the Greek explorers who founded Marseilles – Massalia – in the sixth century BCE noticed the similarity to their native land; no doubt they supposed that grape vines successfully cultivated in Greece would also thrive in the south of France – and in Puglia, and all around the Mediterranean basin. Even today there is a distinctive quality of berries and pepper in the ordinary red table wines of Greece, Italy, France, Spain. Zinfandels? Close enough.