Though the fragmentation of land ownership was one of the conditions that favored the creation of cooperative wineries, it also remains one of their innate weaknesses. Fragmented ownership obstructs the realization of the economies of scale possible in large agricultural operations, particularly those that involve mechanization. At cooperatives, 90 percent of the viticultural work is manual labor. The cost of the grapes is higher (by about 50 percent) than it would be if the cooperative could take advantage of economies of scale. Fragmentation also leads to disparities of grape quality among cooperative members. Farmer members by nature resist changes that markets ask for, demand, or necessitate. A lack of collaborative behavior stymies development. Extrafamilial collaboration is challenging for many Sicilians. They have historically preferred to work alone or within a family structure. In a cooperative, the farmer-owners meet regularly and elect an executive committee and/or president from their ranks. Typically the committee or president then selects a managing director, who hires a technical and marketing team, and fills all the other positions necessary to run a winery. Unfortunately, with the exception of the technical team, these positions customarily have been handed out as favors to influential farmers, politicians, and friends and relatives of the executive board. The selection process typically takes little account of training, experience, or talent.
Sicilian cooperatives largely sell grape juice (must) and wine in bulk. The must is mechanically concentrated into a syrupy sweetener called concentrated rectified must. In 2006 this accounted for 25 percent of the Sicilian wine grape harvest. EU subsidies supported the production of the must as a means of venting excess juice and wine. Italian wine law requires wine producers to use concentrated rectified must as the means of enriching grape juice to achieve higher alcohol levels in the finished wine. Cooperatives unload must and wine quickly at low margins rather than bottling, branding, and selling their wines to specific markets. Even if cooperatives wanted to take advantage of the profits associated with selling wine in bottle, the characteristic incompetence of their untrained marketing teams would doom such initiatives to failure. Even so, loans for cooperative development and creation have often been secured based on business plans that feature increased profits from bottling and merchandising. The weaknesses of the marketing team become a problem only a decade after a cooperative's founding, when stocks of bottled wine remain unsold, loans have dried up, and debts have devoured income. Cooperatives thus typically have enabled farmers to take the first step toward self-determination, but not the second or the third.
After cooperative wineries, particularly in western Sicily, facilitated the export bulk wine boom of the 1970s, they transferred their energy toward obtaining distillation subsidies. Their near-monopoly of the Sicilian bulk wine industry and their close ties with political structures were advantageous. Cooperative creation and expansion intensified during the 1970s and early 1980s. By 1970 there were seventy-three cooperatives vinify-ing 37 percent of Sicily's grapes. By 1980 there were 197 cooperatives, which processed 51 percent of all Sicilian wine grapes. As of 1987, 191 cooperatives produced 78 percent of the volume of Sicilian wine, but 97 percent of what they sold was bulk wine.
EU POLICIES FROM THE MID-1980S THROUGH THE 2000S: THE DECLINE OF COOPERATIVES
Distillation schemes kept the cooperatives busy throughout the 1980s. Sicilian politicians did their best to preserve distillation subsidies. By the mid-1980s, it became evident that distillation policies had neither remedied overproduction nor helped Sicily to restructure its wine industry in a positive direction. In 1984 the EU reduced subsidies for the production of must concentrate, which has a number of uses, including the enrichment of Italian wines. Until the early 1980s, Italian wine law allowed producers to add as much as 15 percent of other wine products to DOC wines. When this loophole was closed, the Sicilian bulk wine industry lost an important source of income.
Before the twentieth-century advent of European wine law, the wine industry and its commentators recognized the existence of unethical blending. But even after wine laws made some of that blending illegal, unethical, if not illicit, blending continued. It was well known that Sicilian bulk wine was still being added to all sorts of wines, both in Italy and abroad. The Sicilian wine industry profited from this business. In 1986, a seemingly unrelated incident had a profound effect on this illegal market. Producers in northwest Italy added methanol to wine, killing or blinding thirty-four people. Regulatory authorities immediately put all shipments of wine under close scrutiny. This disrupted the underground flow of illegal Sicilian bulk wine into mainland Italy, France, and other countries.
In 1987 the EU faced the entry of yet another huge overproducer, Spain, into its economic community. This new source of bulk wine not only was a major competitor to Italy in the EU trading bloc but also compelled EU bureaucrats to more carefully monitor and enforce the criteria for distillation subsidies that the reforms of 1982 had established. Still, the interventions were insufficient to stabilize the market. An aggressive EU vine-pull program went into effect in 1988. Vine acreage in Sicily dropped from 202,000 hectares (499,153 acres) in 1987 to 144,152 hectares (356,207 acres) in 1995. Additional subsidies supported the changeover to recommended industries such as vegetable and fruit farming. The result can be seen in the fields of polyethylene tubular tents (greenhouses, or serre, the plural of serra) that line the southeastern coastline of Sicily.
Reforms since 1999 have sought to eliminate EU market intervention, not always successfully. Crisis distillation went into force as of 2000. Instead of following a complex tiered system of forced and optional distillation measures decreed by Brussels, regions of the EU were left to regulate their own oversupply problems. When they could not and oversupply reached crisis levels, certain regions asked their state governments to seek financial support from the EU to pay for crisis distillation. The EU in 2006 balked at continuing this program, concerned that its distillation strategies were not effective in reducing overproduction. It singled out France and Italy for making excess demands on the fund and approved distillation of lower quantities of wine and at lower prices than the two countries wanted. For the 2009–10 crisis distillation campaign, Sicily requested and received more of this assistance than any other region of Italy. The tally for Sicily was 174,054 hectoliters (4,598,020 gallons) designated for crisis distillation. Apulia was second in distillation requests, with 120,749 hectoliters (3,189,851 gallons).
Italy has continued to make requests for crisis regulation. As of 2010, farmers could apply to receive EU funds for the premature removal of grapes, an action called vendemmia verde ("green harvest"). This is considered an anticrisis tactic because its implementation anticipates rather than responds to a wine oversupply. It targets farmers for financial assistance more precisely than coerced distillation, which spreads the money to wine producers, distillers, and support industries. Vendemmia verde subsidies alone, however, cannot cure the fundamental problem, which is too many vineyards producing grapes that do not have a market. In addition to vendemmia verde, the EU has continued to offer assistance for grubbing up vines.
During the 1990s, with wine distillation subsidies waning, many cooperatives began to fold or combine with others to form larger entities. The idea was that economies of scale could help improve efficiency. By 2008 there were about eighty Sicilian cooperative wineries, producing about 80 percent of Sicilian wine. However, New World countries, such as Australia and Argentina, with more advanced technologies and greater economies of scale, particularly at the viticultural level, threatened to outcompete Sicily in making wine at all price points, including for the bulk market. Though this domination has not occurred, the bulk market has continued to deteriorate as consumer demand for low-cost wine has waned. Cooperatives in particular have not been able to transition from