Читать книгу The World of Sicilian Wine - Bill Nesto - Страница 13

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THE LOST OPPORTUNITY

1775 to 1950

In 1774 a Florentine named Domenico Sestini came to Sicily to study the island's indigenous vine varieties, wine regions, and wines. A little less than forty years later he delivered a series of lectures titled “Recollections of Sicilian Wines” (Memorie sui vini siciliani) to the prestigious Florentine society of agronomists and scientists known as the Georgofili Academy. Sestini had gone to Catania at the age of twenty-four as the guest of Ignazio Paternò. In addition to studying the written works of the historian Tomaso Fazello and the botanists Francisco Cupani and Paolo Boccone in Paternò's vast library, Sestini spent three years traveling the island and studying its soil, climate, viticulture, and vinification methods. Unfortunately, the treatise that is thought to be the culmination of his study is no longer in existence. In his first lecture, Sestini declared that Sicilian wines had been prized since antiquity for their “exquisiteness and richness” and that he would report on seven subregions: Mascali (Etna), Vittoria, Syracuse/Augusta, Castelvetrano, Milazzo, Messina, and Catania.¹ By the end of the third lecture he had covered only two, Mascali and Vittoria. Sestini began his third lecture, about the wines of Vittoria, with a rebuke to his Tuscan audience: any “Turk,” he told them, would be interested in what he had to say, even if these Florentines were not!² Originally, Sestini had intended to give at least seven lectures to the academy, but the evident disrespect for Sicilian wine among his audience persuaded him that his observations would be better kept to himself.

While the late eighteenth century saw the growth of its wine industry, Sicily at that time still had not overcome many of its historic socioeconomic challenges. In the early 1700s Sicily barely had its own merchant fleet—only about twenty of its ships were capable of reaching even Genoa. From the late eighteenth to the early part of the nineteenth century, the British fleet's need for wine supplies allowed Sicily to sell enormous quantities of wine without need of its own merchant fleet. When Admiral Horatio Nelson left Sicily for the Nile in 1798 to fight an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte, he took more than forty thousand gallons of Sicilian wine.³ The Sicilian wine industry was dependent on the British fleet and on foreign merchants and their ships until the early nineteenth century.

Giovanni Attilio Arnolfini, an economist from Lucca, in a 1768 visit to Sicily identified the principal areas of both its production and its export of wine as Castelvetrano, Marsala, Castellammare del Golfo, Alcamo, Vittoria, Mascali, Milazzo, and Syracuse.⁴ More specifically, he noted that the white wines of Castelvetrano were shipped to Genoa and Gibraltar, the red wines of Vittoria were sent to Livorno, and wines from the Modica area and Augusta in southeast Sicily and the wines from Mascali, north of Catania, went to Malta.⁵

While Sestini praised Sicily as being capable of producing fine and stable wines, it lacked an indigenous wine culture that valued both careful viticulture and enology. In 1786, Pietro Lanza—an ancestor of the Tasca d'Almerita family, the owners of Regaleali and other wine brands—published his prescription for the deficiencies of Sicilian agriculture, “An Account of the Decline of Sicilian Agriculture and the Way to Remedy It” (Memoria sulla decadenza dell'agricoltura siciliana e il modo di rimediarvi). He recognized that the bounty of Sicilian harvests had attracted the attention of foreign merchants but that indiscriminate harvesting practices, including rough handling of the grapes, and a lack of cleanliness in the winemaking process compromised wine quality.

BRITISH INFLUENCE

Entrepreneurship landed on Sicily's west coast in the late eighteenth century. In 1770 John Woodhouse, an Englishman, arrived at the port of Marsala looking to increase the exports of sodium carbonate, widely used in the production of glass and soap. Well before Woodhouse arrived in Sicily, British merchants had played a pivotal role in the development of the fortified wines Sherry and Madeira. Fortification (the addition of spirits) ensured stability during transport by ship.

After tasting the local wine, Woodhouse realized that he could make a less expensive version of Madeira for British consumers. He perceived the potential of the local grapes. They were inexpensive. Labor was both plentiful and inexpensive. Other British entrepreneurs, such as Benjamin Ingham and John Hopps, followed in his wake. They saw the market opportunity to sell popular wine styles made in Sicily at a time when some of Britain's other supplier countries, such as France, were subject to an embargo during the naval blockade against Napoleon. They brought with them something even rarer in Sicily than capital: the spirit of enterprise, the understanding of commerce, the knowledge of markets, and the ethos of industry and collaboration. They also brought a market-driven standard of consistency to Sicilian winemaking. They fronted money so Sicilian farmers could expand their vineyards and improve the quality of their grapes. They hired and otherwise supported innumerable Sicilians by investing in the farming, the production, and the transport of Marsala wine. They also invested in the infrastructure of the town of Marsala. Woodhouse built the first of a series of jetties that improved the harbor of Marsala for shipping and transport. The British entrepreneurs also rented and built structures to house their businesses and improved roads to facilitate the transport of goods in and out of the town of Marsala.

By 1805, Thomas Jefferson had procured a pipe (a barrel that holds four hundred liters [106 gallons]) of Woodhouse's Marsala wine for his Monticello wine cellar through the office of the U.S. secretary of the navy. In a thank-you letter to a representative of the navy, Jefferson wrote, “I received the hogshead of Marsala wine you were so kind as to send me. Altho’ not yet fined (which operation I always leave to time), I perceive it is an excellent wine, and well worthy of being laid in stocks to acquire age.”⁶ Ingham, who followed Woodhouse in 1806, wrote a handbook that prescribed improvements in viticultural and enological practices for Sicilian winegrowers. In the early nineteenth century, he was already shipping Marsala wine to local agents in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

From 1806 to 1815, Britain stationed its army on Sicily to defend the Bourbon kingdom against a possible invasion by Napoleon and to block the French from controlling the central Mediterranean. This strengthened the Sicilian political clout of the British Marsala merchants, who had also lent money to the Bourbon king. Their influence was so great that when the town of Marsala asked the Bourbon government if it could levy an exportation tax on the producers of Marsala, the government refused.

Beginning in the period of their occupation of Sicily and then rule of the nearby island of Malta, the British also helped to fuel demand for the inexpensive table wines (vini da pasto) from the ports of Riposto, Messina, and Milazzo in northeastern Sicily. Their navy, under Nelson's command, recognized the stability of Sicilian wine on long sea voyages. During the Napoleonic wars, the British navy became a flagship customer for both Marsala and the red table wines from eastern Sicily. As a colony of the British Empire, Malta served as a shipping depot for larger British merchant ships plying the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. By 1824 it was the principal export destination for ships originating from Riposto, about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) northeast of Catania, that carried much of the wines and other products of eastern Sicily. By 1850, Riposto exported almost as much wine annually as did Marsala.

SICILIAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM TAKES ROOT

The British merchants, with their values and innovations, served as models for Sicilians to emulate. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a great expansion of the Sicilian wine industry. For example, by 1824 more than 90 percent of the cargo ships departing for Malta from Riposto were built by local shipbuilders and owned by merchants and investors from eastern Sicily. In addition to the table wines and other produce of Mascali, the ships of Riposto transported chestnut wine barrels and vats made from wood harvested on the slopes of Mount Etna. A traveler's guide published in Sicily in 1859 identified the island's most highly regarded wine-producing areas: Milazzo, Bagheria (just east of Palermo), Partinico, Alcamo, Castellammare, Castelvetrano, Vittoria, Syracuse, Mascali, “terre forti” (the low southern slopes of Etna where strong, full-bodied wines were made), Savoca (between Taormina and Messina, south of the Faro area, which had been famous for wine since the turn of the nineteenth century), and, of course, Marsala.⁷ Before then, the only wine producers to become famous had come from Marsala and made fortified wine. There was, however, one exception.

In 1824, Giuseppe Alliata, the duke of Salaparuta, near Palermo, began bottling estate wines at his Villa Valguarnera at Bagheria. At first he bottled them for family use and to share his winemaking triumphs with his guests. The wines, a dry white, a dry red, and a sweet wine, were considered French in style because of their delicate taste. They were later named Corvo, after the contrada ("neighborhood") where the grapes originated. The wines of Duca di Salaparuta would be Sicily's beacons of quality for the next 150 years.

In 1832, Vincenzo Florio became a Marsala producer and merchant. He was born in Calabria in 1799. The Florio family was entrepreneurial and had business interests in the town of Marsala. As a young man, Florio had traveled for six years throughout the Italian mainland, to France, and to Britain, gaining a broad understanding of the world of business. Several years after his return, he set up the Florio Marsala business. Within a few decades, Florio's business activities had vastly expanded in diverse commercial sectors, and he even joined with a business competitor, Benjamin Ingham, to form a shipping company. Meanwhile, to supply the expanding Marsala trade, vineyards had spread beyond Marsala to Mazara del Vallo, Partinico, and Balestrate. By 1854, Florio's annual Marsala production almost equaled that of Woodhouse. Florio became Sicily's model entrepreneur and industrialist. And at the time of his death, in 1868, his Italian assets were worth one-third more than those of Ingham, the most successful of the British merchants in Marsala.

On May 11, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, leading a thousand volunteers called redshirts, embarked from Genoa in two ships and landed in Marsala. His goal was to unite Italy into a single nation. Sicilians, many of them poor peasants from the countryside, flocked to his army to liberate their island from Bourbon rule. After three months of battles, his army controlled Sicily. Garibaldi then pressed on to mainland Italy, but during a return visit to Marsala in 1862, he toured the cellars of Florio. Meanwhile, the British Marsala merchants were finding the newly liberated Sicily less hospitable to their commercial interests. Once liberation was won, many of Garibaldi's Sicilian volunteers, armed and without battles to fight, terrorized the countryside. They became mercenaries for wealthy landowners. It was increasingly difficult to conduct business in a climate where theft was rampant, contracts were not enforced, and protection money was part of the cost of doing business. The new Italian government imposed higher taxes on spirits, an important ingredient in Marsala production. As a result, Marsala producers had to increase their prices, which contributed to a contraction of the market.

As the influence of the British entrepreneurs waned, more Sicilians entered the Marsala trade. In the decade after unification, Sicilians established five new houses—Diego Rallo & Figli, Nicola Spanò & C., Giacomo Mineo & Figli, C. & F. F.lli. Martinez, and D'Alì & Bordonaro. By 1880, in the province of Trapani, the focus of Marsala production, there were about eighteen. By 1895 there were about forty. Many of the Sicilians who entered the Marsala industry were merchants with little or no connection to the world of agriculture, a circumstance that ultimately undermined Marsala's potential as a producer of quality wine in the century to follow. Faced with the challenges of the phylloxera infestation that arrived in 1893, taxation not only on buying spirits but also on making wine, and a worsening market in the United States due to the increasing anti-alcohol sentiment there, many merchants gutted the quality of Marsala at the expense of their industry's long-term health.

THE IMPACT OF PHYLLOXERA

The phylloxera louse had been identified in the south of France as early as 1866. Its spread across France devastated vineyards and left French merchants without enough wine to supply their clients. For the next twenty years, French merchants increasingly came to Sicily looking for inexpensive, deeply colored, alcoholic, tannic cutting wine (vino da taglio), which they could bring back to France, mix with lighter and less-rich northern wines, and then clarify, stabilize, and sell using false indications of origin. Sicilian growers and merchants seized the opportunity to supply the French merchants. During the 1870s the Sicilian cutting wine industry flourished. To satisfy the demand, Sicilian winegrowers planted more vines. In 1874, there were 211,454 hectares (522,514 acres) of vineyards in Sicily. In 1880 that rose to 321,718 hectares (794,982 acres). This was the historic high point for vineyard surface in Sicily. As of 2010, the island had 115,686 hectares (285,866 acres) of vineyards, 36 percent of what was planted in 1880. In 1880 Sicilian wine production reached 8,043,000 hectoliters (212,473,582 gallons).

But the boom went bust. By 1892, Sicilian vineyard acreage and wine production had both sharply decreased, to 213,237 hectares (526,918 acres) and 4,246,000 hectoliters (112,167,453 gallons) respectively. To restore their vineyards, French farmers had been replanting with vines grafted onto American rootstocks. The volume of wine produced by the French harvest had rebounded by 1885. In 1888, the Italo-France Treaty of Commerce of 1881, which had lowered barriers to trade between the two countries, expired. Not only had the French vineyards been restored, but the political relationship between Italy and France had soured, due to Italy's increasingly close ties with Germany, which remained a rival to France after having humiliated it during the Franco-Prussian war. Protectionist measures such as tariffs took the place of the treaty, and French merchants left Sicily—without having made significant contributions to its wine industry, unlike the British. A British consular report of 1888 describes the crisis at the port of Palermo: “There was also a great falling-off in French ships, due to the enormous increase in tonnage dues on French vessels imposed during 1887. Only 13 vessels, of 17,925 tons, arrived, against 108 of 130,773 tons in 1886.”⁸ The British consular report of 1889 describes the consequences in Sicily: “The failure to renew the treaty of commerce between Italy and France has had most disastrous effects upon the wine trade, and prices have fallen greatly . . . to 50%, nearly.”⁹

As of 1887, the Catania wine trade, which exported mostly from the port of Riposto, felt the greatest impact from the loss of French trade. In response, Riposto merchants looked for British and U.S. buyers. While the dark, coarse vino da taglio wines might have suited the needs of French merchants, they did not suit British and American merchants, who required finished dry wines with a lower alcohol content. The British vice-consul at the time described the Sicilian export wines as “green,” “shipped . . . in badly coopered casks of chestnut,” and as a result not likely to be sold abroad.¹⁰ The British understood that “defective final preparation” was the reason that Sicilian producers were not finding export markets for their red wines, given that “the French for many years have been enabled to introduce them into the world's markets after due manipulation at Cette and Bordeaux.”¹¹

The absence of French traders, however, was not Sicily's only challenge. Phylloxera invaded the island in 1880 at Riesi. By 1885, provinces throughout Sicily were reporting infestations. Given the poor demand for Sicilian wine, it made no sense to replant the devastated vineyards, particularly the ones on slopes that were more difficult and more costly to work. Though the economic forecast for its wine industry was not good, the Italian government supported Sicily's efforts to halt the progress of the infestation and to provide phylloxera-resistant rootstocks developed in Sicily, at first free of charge and later at growers’ cost. Sicily's success in combating its phylloxera infestation was founded on its historic strength: agriculture. By 1889 the British vice-consul was also reporting improvements in Sicilian vinification practices. Some producers were beginning to show “a greater care and cleanliness, and their wine has been of a better quality.”¹² Perhaps the loss of the French market had forced some Sicilian producers to improve their wine. At the same time, among a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs and nobility, an interest in making fine wine developed.

PROTO-MODERN QUALITY WINES EMERGE

In the wake of the collapse of the French bulk wine market, a small but significant quality wine industry developed in Sicily during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The British consul William Stigand's report of 1889 to the British Parliament noted, “The most enterprising of Sicilian wine growers having already taken part in the exhibitions of Italian wines at Rome, Bologna, and other Italian towns with considerable success, and also gained distinction by medals and diplomas at the Italian Exhibition in London, at length determined to hold exhibitions of their own.”¹³ There seemed to be a strong spark in 1889, when the first Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition was held in Palermo and the Circolo Enofilio Siciliano ("Circle of Sicilian Oenophiles") met for the first time, also at Palermo.

Edoardo Alliata, the duke of Salaparuta, had taken over the production of Corvo on the death of his father, Giuseppe, in 1844. Under his direction, Corvo went from the low-volume production of a family estate to a high-volume commercial product. During several visits to France and Tuscany, Alliata realized that he had to modernize the way Corvo was made. He constructed the first wine production facility at Casteldaccia, near the Corvo contrada. He sought the advice of his brother Fabrizio, who lived in Paris, and of Louis Oudart, the French enologist of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, a Piedmont politician who in 1861 became the first prime minister of Italy. Alliata hired the French technician Giovanni Lagarde and bought new French presses, whose design made Corvo white wine delicate and fresh tasting. It was a great contrast to the ambertinted, high-alcohol, coarse-textured white wines typical of Sicily. After the unification of Italy in 1860, fifty thousand bottles of Corvo, half of the annual production, were sold in Sicily and the other half on the Italian mainland. By 1876, Corvo white and red were being exported to America and northern Europe. Some bottles even reached Australia. The wines won numerous awards at competitions and fairs around the world, medaling in Paris in 1878, Melbourne in 1881, and Bordeaux in 1882. Corvo white, according to the British consul Stigand, was held in higher esteem than the red. He likened it to a “white Burgundy, though heavier in the palate than Chablis.” The red Corvo was “pure” and “like a strong Burgundy” “but does not keep very well.”¹⁴ Stigand also compared Corvo sweet wine to Sauternes. In 1889, Alliata became the first president of the Circolo Enofilio Siciliano.

Some forty-eight kilometers (thirty miles) southeast of Palermo at Montemaggiore, Prince Baucina planted vine cuttings from the famous Rheingau wine town of Johannisberg in the vineyards on his property, La Contessa. These faced northeast, north, and northwest at 550 meters (1,804 feet) above sea level on the slopes of a mountain. The exposition and high elevation guaranteed temperatures that, though warmer than those of the Rheingau, would have been suitable for these vine varieties (which should have included Riesling, although there is no specific mention of it). According to Stigand, La Contessa's clayey soil resembled that of Johannisberg.¹⁵ The king of Italy had the emperor of Germany sample La Contessa's wine, though there are no records of his comments. Baucina fermented his wine in cask rather than in vat and let it mature in cask for three and a half years, with many rackings. It was reputed to be light and delicate. He sold his wine in fluted bottles in twelve-bottle cases from stores in Palermo, Rome, and Naples.

For about twenty years bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, the Tasca family bottled a wine named after their villa, Camastra, at the southwest edge of the Conca d'Oro, the semicircular plain that encompasses Palermo. The white Camastra was principally a Catarratto and Inzolia blend. Perricone, Nerello Mascalese, and Nero d'Avola dominated the red Camastra. These wines won awards such as a Medal of Honor at the Syracuse Exposition of 1871 and were sold in Europe and America.

About fifteen miles west of Palermo, Duc d'Aumale produced a wine called Zucco. He was a Frenchman, Henri d'Orleans, who came to Sicily in 1853 and acquired the six thousand hectare (14,826 acre) Lo Zucco estate four miles south of the village of Terrasini. He brought cuttings from Spain, the Rheingau, and Bordeaux, planted native varieties such as Perricone and Catarratto, and employed French technicians, including a viticulturist and an enologist. He began planting vineyards in 1860. As of 1889 he had reached about two hundred hectares (about five hundred acres) and was employing some five hundred to six hundred workers. He made at least two white wines, one called Moscato Zucco or Lo Zucco, which was very aromatic and sweet, with 15 to 18 percent alcohol, and Lo Zucco Secco, made with the Catarratto grape variety and much like a Marsala: dry and amber colored, with 16 to 17 percent alcohol. He also made red wines, but these were less highly esteemed. The British consul Stigand said the sweet white Zucco was more similar to Sauternes than to Sherry or Marsala.¹⁶ It was in such demand in France that it was not available in Palermo. In 2011 a Palermo wine company, Cusumano, released a Moscato dello Zucco inspired by d'Aumale's sweet white. Cusumano's first vintage of this wine was the 2007. Though Cusumano uses Moscato Bianco, as the Moscato dello Zucco brand registered by the Istituto Regionale della Vite e del Vino (IRVV) requires, the historical Moscato Zucco used raisined Moscato Giallo.¹⁷

Stigand also reported on the wine Tornamira, produced by Cavaliere Melchiorre Striglia, who was originally from Piedmont. About five miles southwest of Zucco, at the village of Tornamira near the large town of Partinico, Striglia set up an estate of seventy hectares (173 acres). His vineyard, planted in the mid-1870s, was at six hundred meters (1,969 feet) above sea level on a slope facing northwest. Stigand describes red Tornamira as similar to a “clean, full-bodied Burgundy.”¹⁸

Near Zucco and Tornamira is an ancient Moorish castle, Castel Calattubo. It is deserted, sits atop a cliff, and is visible from highway A29, which connects Palermo to Marsala. Principe don Pietro Papé di Valdina named his wine after this castle. His vineyards of some thirty hectares (seventy-four acres) were on slopes overlooking the Bay of Castellammare. The white Castel Calattubo contained 14 to 15 percent alcohol. Stigand described it as “one of the finest of Sicilian white wines,” even more delicate than Corvo white.¹⁹ It was made from Catarratto and kept two years in barrel and one in bottle. It won gold medals at several international exhibitions, including the one that the Palermo Chamber of Commerce awarded at that city's first Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition. In 1898 Castel Calattubo was served at a court reception in Rome for King Umberto I of Italy, along with a Gattinara from Piedmont and Champagne.

Near Mezzojuso about twenty miles southwest of Palermo, at an altitude of 550 meters (1,804 feet), Marchese Policastello made both red and white wines called Castel di Mezzoiuso. At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, one of these won a silver medal. Stigand describes the white Mezzoiuso as “something similar in flavour to a Chablis, with a slight dash of Sauterne; the red wine could not be distinguished from a good Bordeaux.”²⁰

The British consular reports of this epoch catalog several more noteworthy Sicilian wine producers. Cavaliere Salvatore Salvia at Casteldaccia made a white wine called Vino Navurra from Inzolia and a red wine from the Perricone variety. He exported his wines to France, Germany, and the north of Italy. Pietro Mirto Seggio of Monreale made a wine named Renda after its contrada of origin. He fitted out his cellar with three state-of-the-art Mabille presses from France. In 1889 the Italian government awarded several enologists in the province of Palermo for the modernity and cleanliness of their wine-making facilities. Seggio and his technician, Signore Saluto, both won silver medals. Edoardo Alliata's winery and Giovanni Lagarde both won bronze.

At Mazara del Vallo, south of Marsala, Vito Favara Verderame, a British vice-consul, established a large winery, Fratelli Favara e Figli, which made a wine called Irene. Stigand reported that it tasted much like white Zucco.²¹ Fratelli Favara also made Sicilian “Champagne.” At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, the company won honorary medals for Irene and its “Champagne.”²²

For the Etna area circa 1889, the British vice-consul Robert O. Franck singled out Baron Antonio Spitaleri as the most important winegrower. He had facilities and 150 hectares (371 acres) of vineyards between Adrano and Biancavilla on the southwest slopes. With grapes coming from elevations of between eight and twelve hundred meters (2,625 and 3,937 feet), he made a range of wines, including a Pinot Nero-based Sicilian “Champagne,” a Sicilian “Cognac,” and an Etna Rosso. He exported to both America and India. In 1888 he made seven thousand export shipments of his wine, some in cask and some by the case.²³ At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, Spitaleri won silver medals for his Etna Rosso and his “Champagne.”

On the western flank of Etna, Alexander Nelson Hood, a distant heir of Admiral Horatio Nelson, made great investments in wine production at a farm in the Gurrida contrada near his family estate, Castello Maniace. Ferdinand III, the Bourbon king of Naples, had granted the castle and its grounds (along with the title “the first Duke of Bronte") to Admiral Nelson in 1799 for his service protecting Sicily against the advances of Napoleon. Hood inherited the estate in 1868. During the 1870s, he tested the suitability of various foreign varieties to the soil and climate of his ninety-seven hectares (240 acres) of vineyards. He brought vines from the island of Madeira, from Bordeaux and Roussillon in France, and from Spain, particularly the area of Granada.²⁴ He finally settled on Grenache Noir. He had the assistance of two French technicians. Before vinification, the grapes were destemmed and damaged berries culled. The “winepressers” wore moccasins of gutta percha, a natural latex with properties similar to those of rubber, while they gently trod the grapes. Asepsis was maintained. The wine then matured in cask for seven years. Hood's winery had a capacity of 180,000 bottles, similar to that of a Bordeaux château. Stigand describes Hood's white wine as “of a light, amber colour, dry, of pleasant bouquet, of a good aroma, with full natural body . . . , esteemed beneficial for invalids; lighter than Marsala, with something of a flavour between Madeira and Sauterne. It has a clear, primesautier [lively] taste, and it is said to keep any length of time and improve in bottle.”²⁵ Hood also made a red wine, labeled Claret, the name the English gave to the red wines of Bordeaux.²⁶

The Mannino dei Plachi family of Catania also produced Etna wines, which they sent to the World's Fair at Vienna in 1873, an exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the 1880 International Competition in Melbourne, and the World's Fair at Paris in 1900. One of the other early foreign wine producers in Sicily, Moritz Lamberger, a.k.a. the Flying Dutchman, set up a winery on Etna in 1900. Capitalizing on the phylloxera infestation of the vineyards in Austria-Hungary, he helped to open up this market for Sicilian wine. In the early twentieth century, the two most famous Etna producers were Carlo Tuccari of Castiglione di Sicilia, who made a wine named Solicchiata after a nearby village, and Biondi & Lanzafame of Trecastagni, which in 1913 and 1914 won top awards in several national exhibitions at Paris and Lyons in France.

At the Italian Exhibition in London in 1888, the fine wines of Sicily were as well represented as those of any other region of Italy. More sophisticated perspectives, both from abroad and in Sicily, had stimulated the growth of an indigenous quality wine industry that was connected to and even recognized by the world. On Edoardo Alliata's death, in 1898, his nineteen-year-old grandson Enrico took over the management of the Corvo estate. Just two years earlier he had worked as an errand boy and cellar hand at a Sauternes wine estate in Bordeaux. Applying techniques that he had learned there, he created Corvo's Prima Goccia ("First Drop,” or, in the language of winemaking, “Free Run"), a wine even more delicate than the regular Corvo. It won the Grand Prix Bassermann at Rome in 1903. But two years later the Palermo Chamber of Commerce severely criticized the wine, judging its delicacy and low alcohol to be evidence of weakness. This disparaging assessment signaled the beginning of the end for Sicily's unusual period of quality wine production. The traditional Sicilian standard that white wines be amber-tinted, alcoholic, slightly sweet and viscous, and with little aroma was reasserting itself. Despite this critical chastisement, the Corvo of Duca di Salaparuta lasted beyond World War I. All the other fine wine producers of the late nineteenth century disappeared. What a tragedy for Sicilian wine!

More tragic for Sicily in this period was the plight of its peasant farmers and small winegrowers, who suffered the impact of the phylloxera infestation and the lingering stranglehold of feudalistic agrarian contracts and taxes. At the beginning of 1894 the government of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi (a Sicilian by birth and a liberal in name) summarily crushed the fast-growing social and political movement that had banded urban artisans, sulfur mine workers, and rural peasants together under the banner Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori ("Sicilian Workers’ League") to protest and strike against the island's abusive land, labor, and tax practices. In the wake of the Fasci suppression, Crispi unexpectedly introduced legislation in July 1894 that proposed fundamental agrarian and tax reform. After his government fell in 1896, the new government of Prime Minister Antonio di Rudinì (a Sicilian aristocrat and wealthy landowner who beginning in 1897 personally oversaw the construction and operation of his own massive, state-of-the-art winemaking facility in Pachino in the southeastern corner of Sicily) wrestled with the aftermath of the Fasci repression and these questions of reform.

In a two-part article in the scientific and literary journal Nuova Antologia ("New Anthology"), the British-born journalist Jessie White Mario wrote about the state of Sicilian viticulture and the great cause of long-overdue land reform.²⁷ She argued that in order for Sicily to realize its promise as an important wine-exporting region of Italy, the government would have to do much more than simply replant vineyards devastated by phylloxera. Above all, according to Mario, it had a political and moral duty to save Sicily's agricultural economy by supporting productive land use and the intensive cultivation required for grapevines, olives, and fruit trees. She argued in favor of the legislation proposed by Prime Minister Crispi to Parliament in 1894 that would have forced the largest landowners (latifondisti) to enter into long-term leases (enfiteusi) with local tenant farmers for medium parcels, ranging from twelve to fifty acres. It also would have provided tenant farmers with fair credit terms and tax breaks. However, Parliament left for its summer break before taking up debate on this legislation, which it ignored on its return. When he came to power in 1896, Prime Minister di Rudinì did not betray his aristocratic class or large landowning constituents. He could have championed the cause of land reform, but he did not. It would be another half century before significant land reform was implemented in Sicily.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1900–1950): THE EMBERS DIE OUT

From 1901 to 1913 Sicily lost more than 30 percent of its agricultural work force to mass emigration to the United States, Argentina, Australia, and other distant countries. Both vineyard acreage and total wine production steadily diminished in the first decade of the twentieth century. When phylloxera infested the vineyards of Salemi and Marsala in 1898, the Marsala industry did what the French wine industry had done twenty-five years earlier. Marsala traders went to the international bulk wine market for substitutes for the local wine. During the first decade of the twentieth century, they imported bulk wines from Apulia, Sardinia, and Tunisia and made concoctions that were supposed to resemble local base wines. As a result, the quality of Marsala was compromised and its image began to suffer. At the same time, a wave of consolidation blurred the identities of Marsala's most famous houses. In 1904 the Florio Marsala company joined with eight other Marsala producers to form a larger company, named, two years later, the Società Vinicola Florio. By 1924 the Cinzano company controlled it. As of 1929 this larger company had purchased the Marsala houses of Woodhouse and Ingham-Whitaker. Though Cinzano successfully restructured and improved product quality and sales, there was a proliferation of small companies making low-cost, low-quality Marsala. The loss of its great names signaled the end of Marsala's golden century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign wine merchants sought out table wines more than vini da taglio. With little interest from French or British buyers, Sicilian wine producers turned to other markets, particularly northern Italy, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Argentina. Success in the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Swiss markets was in part determined by the same phenomenon that had stimulated France's interest in Sicilian wine: the spread of phylloxera, which arrived in these countries later than in France but earlier than in Sicily. As these countries restored their vineyards, Sicilians had more difficultly entering their markets. Sicilian producers wanting to export now also had the healthy French wine industry and the recovering Spanish wine industry to contend with. And they faced more problems. In 1904 the Austro-Hungarian Empire closed its borders to Italian goods because of a deteriorating political relationship between the two countries. France and Spain were strong competitors for the German and Swiss markets. World War I destroyed the German market. Beginning in 1919, Prohibition in the United States eliminated what had been another promising market. By 1920, vineyard acreage island-wide had declined to its lowest point since the mid-nineteenth century. The Italian government of 1920 to 1924 imposed heavy taxation on wine. During this period, taxes accounted for 43 percent of the cost of a hectoliter (twenty-six gallons) of Etna wine.

Between the two World Wars, Sicily's vineyard acreage increased. Italy's entry into World War II on the side of the Germans in 1940 interrupted Sicily's commerce until British and U.S. forces liberated the island in 1943. The volume of Sicilian wine production was 6,900,000 hectoliters (182,278,716 gallons) in 1938. In 1949 this had dropped to 3,790,000 hectoliters (100,121,208 gallons). After World War II there was also another mass emigration of agricultural manpower, this time to northern Italy, which offered jobs in heavy industry.

By 1950 the Sicilian wine industry had lost almost everything it had achieved during the nineteenth century. The Marsala trade opened the nineteenth century with the potential to increase in size and reputation, which it had largely fulfilled by 1900. But fifty years later Marsala had tied itself too closely to sweet concoctions designed for sale to bakers and the processed food industry. Moreover, from 1950 to 2000, consumer tastes gradually moved away from oxidized, fortified wines. The large-scale vino da taglio business returned briefly during the 1950s and halfway through the 1960s, until consumer demand for inexpensive, fresher, lower-alcohol table wines diminished its market. Sicily should have learned from its experience during the nineteenth century that vino da taglio confers nothing on the producer or the producing country.

Sicily's fine wine efforts of the late nineteenth century, like many of its native vines, have largely been erased from memory. In many European cultures (and particularly in Sicily), aristocrats did not want to be perceived as dirtying their hands doing business, let alone the lowliest of all businesses, agriculture. Stigand observed that proprietors were reluctant to share information about their winemaking activities because they wanted to be perceived as “exclusively occupied with the cares of polite life.”²⁸ He chastised Marchese Policastello for making “no efforts” to put his wine, Mezzoiuso, in the market. Stigand's words still ring true today: “The great thing lacking among Sicilians for putting their products into the market is the spirit of association. If they have little confidence in the foreigner, they really have next to none among themselves; and, when invited to unite for a common purpose, suspect that the invitation is made to get some advantage prejudicial to their individual interests.”²⁹ Instead of establishing their own identity, they have let foreigners determine it for them. When business was not good, Sicilians blamed outsiders for taking advantage of their natural resources and labor. They characteristically ignored the impact of their own behavior and actions when faced with declining prosperity.

Edoardo Alliata, however, was cut from different cloth. According to Stigand, he had “a deep interest in the general extension of the wine trade in Sicily, and has expressed his desire to enter into communication with any persons, foreign or native, who might be willing to join in operations for a common good—the introduction of pure Sicilian ordinary wines into England.”³⁰ The spirit that Alliata demonstrated would revisit Sicilian winegrowers in the last decade of the twentieth century, giving them another chance to take the reins of their own destiny.