The World of Sicilian Wine. Bill Nesto
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