The World of Sicilian Wine. Bill Nesto
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.
3
THE MODERN SICILIAN WINE INDUSTRY
EUROPEAN UNION POLICIES OF THE 1950S THROUGH THE EARLY 1980S
The 1957 Treaty of Rome ensured that goods could move freely across the borders of European Union member states.1 Following this, the Stresa Conference of 1958 outlined agricultural policy for members of the EU, which supported the principle that they would act as a bloc to solve problems associated with the agroeconomic difficulties of individual members. The conference guaranteed farmers in the EU that prices for their products would not fall below a predetermined level common to all member states. These prices would ensure farmers a secure livelihood. The system was essentially one of price supports.
Before the creation of the EU, the wine industries of France and Italy, the two leading wine-producing nations of the world, were remarkably insulated from each other. The policies of the Stresa Conference were the first steps in breaking down that insulation. Because both France and Italy had, at that time, high levels of per capita wine consumption and access to the northern European markets that desired their wine exports, EU bureaucrats did not foresee that there would be mercantile conflict between these two wine production giants.
There was an expansion of vineyard planting in Italy during the Fascist period between the two World Wars. After 1950, vineyard acreage declined slightly until expansion began again in 1957. This decline was due to the extirpation or abandonment of old, diseased, and difficult-to-work vineyards and to the dwindling agricultural labor force. Vineyard acreage reached its postwar high in 1959, when 236,000 hectares (583,169 acres) produced 6,270,000 hectoliters (165,635,877 gallons) of wine.
Until the 1960s, the principal wine production of Sicily was dedicated to either high-alcohol white wines for Marsala production or high-alcohol red wines for export. These concentrated wines could only be produced with low yields and alberello (literally “little tree") training, a labor-intensive method of inducing low-lying vines to produce a small crop per plant. Before the 1960s, yields were low, on average less than fifty quintals per hectare (4,461 pounds per acre). In western Sicily most of the wine produced was white; in eastern Sicily, red. Much of the high-alcohol red wine was bulk wine that was shipped to northern and central Italy, where it was blended into local wine that needed color or alcohol.
During the late 1950s, French merchants purchased large volumes of cheap wine from other sources, notably Tunisia and Algeria, which were both still colonies of France. French wine technology, the most advanced in the world, helped develop their wine industries. Tunisia's independence in 1956 resulted in the deterioration of its wine industry. Its role as a supplier of bulk wine to France diminished. After Algeria's independence in 1962, its bulk wine exports to France also dwindled. Still, treaty obligations forced France to buy seven million hectoliters (184,920,437 gallons) of Algerian wine until 1970.
In 1968 the EU for the first time removed internal customs duties. This allowed for a free flow of products across member borders. Uniform customs duties on imports from nonmember states protected EU members equally. These policies made the EU a trading bloc. In the following year the EU began to standardize wine regulations. It approved member state laws that regulated the quality but not the quantity of wine produced. Yield regulations—part of the geographically based certifications appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) in France and denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) in Italy—associated with the quality wine categories made it highly unlikely that the quantity of quality wine would become a problem. France, however, expressed concern about the quantity of largely unregulated bulk wine, principally what was produced in Italy. Italian wine producers wanted to exploit two EU member markets, France and West Germany. Italian politicians successfully stifled the passage of EU regulations that would have limited Italian wine production. The most the EU could do was set up a system to monitor the quantities of wine produced by member states. Concern over oversupply remained. EU members discussed emergency policies such as the storage or distillation of surplus bulk wine as a means of controlling supply and demand, which would assure a bulk wine price that would protect the livelihoods of EU grape farmers and wine producers.
Domestic consumption trends within France and Italy aggravated the balance of wine trade between the two. Annual domestic wine consumption in France had registered an overall downward trend since at least 1960. In Italy, annual domestic consumption rose until 1969, when it began a downward trend that culminated in a steep decline from 1974 to 1978. These downward trends continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century. They set the stage for an enormous overproduction of wine after 1970 in Italy, particularly Sicily. Not only were the prices of Italian bulk wines generally lower than those of French bulk wines, but the Italian wine industry grew in leaps and bounds because it believed that there was unlimited potential in both overseas and domestic markets. The diminishing supply of Algerian and Tunisian bulk wine and the EU agreements that opened up trade among EU members induced French wine merchants to look for cheaper bulk wine than could be purchased in France. They found it in Sicily and Apulia.
A series of large harvests in the early 1970s in France and Italy began to create an oversupply of bulk wine in the EU market. French bulk wine producers, largely from the Languedoc area on the Mediterranean coast, had a difficult time selling their wine. They became infuriated when they saw Italian wine, purchased by French merchants, arriving in their country. In 1974, French wine producers began a series of provocative actions aimed at calling national attention to their problem.2 They blocked the unloading of tanker ships at the Mediterranean port of Sète (named Cette until 1928), where most of the Sicilian bulk wine arrived. The “War of Sète” that these incidents kicked off lasted until 1980. Such demonstrations stirred the sympathy of French citizens. French politicians, under pressure to act, imposed import taxes on Italian wine. These taxes, however, violated the EU agreements guaranteeing free trade among member states. In 1976 the taxes were rescinded. By the end of the decade, of a total Sicilian production of about ten million hectoliters (264,172,052 gallons), five million (132,086,026) were exported. Eighty percent of Sicily's wine exports went to France, a pattern that resembled the one of one hundred years before; the remaining portion went mainly to Russia.
After Sicily reached its postwar vineyard acreage high in 1959, the modernization