While Duca di Salaparuta and Tasca d'Almerita largely built the foundation on which the modern quality wine industry rests, other estates also played important roles. At Milo on the east face of Etna, the Nicolosi family had set high standards of viticulture and vinification since the eighteenth century. On a small scale, in 1948 Carmelo Nicolosi Asmundo bottled Etna Rosso. In 1971, Rapitala, at Alessandro di Camporeale near Palermo, began the production of quality wine. Three years earlier the Frenchman Hugues Bernard had married Gigi Guarrasi, who owned the estate. Bernard moved to Rapitala and brought his French sensibilities about wine with him. During the 1980s, he added French varieties to the native ones already planted there. The first vintage of Tentua Rapitala to be bottled was the 1976. The next step in the ascent toward the modern quality wine industry was Donnafugata. Giacomo Rallo foresaw both the problems that the Marsala industry would face in the ensuing years and the eventual opening of the quality wine sector. In 1983 he left the Marsala house Diego Rallo & Figli, which his family owned, and, with his wife, Gabriella Anca Rallo, established the wine estate and brand Donnafugata. Their wines, many of which are named after characters and places in the literary works of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, sparked the public's imagination. Meanwhile, in 1980 three friends studying at the University of Palermo, Giambattista ("Titta") Cilia, Giusto Occhipinti, and Cirino Strano, fused their surname initials to create COS, the name of their winery in Vittoria in Sicily's southeast. Though Strano left the partnership in its early days, his S has stuck. Eager to discover the wine world beyond Sicily, Cilia and Occhipinti traveled to Tuscany and France. In 1983 they bought used French barriques from the Piedmont producer Angelo Gaja. In the late 1980s they purchased new French ones.
During the 1980s, Sicily's leading light in the drive for quality was a race car driver turned winemaker. Marco De Bartoli took over one of his family's estates, Vecchio Samperi, in 1978. He believed that Marsala wine had lost its historic quality and its ability to compete in the quality wine sector. He purchased barrels of different fine old Marsalas, then masterfully blended and bottled them. His Vecchio Samperi, created in 1980, caused a stir in the Marsala community. It was not fortified, which, by law, all wines that bear the name Marsala must be. As a result, De Bartoli was not allowed to put the appellation Marsala on the label. His wines and boundless enthusiasm and pride found advocates among journalists, though his Marsala was never a market success. Beginning with its first vintage in 1984, De Bartoli's Passito di Pantelleria Bukkuram brought attention to the sweet wines of the island of Pantelleria. He made a style that respected tradition but was less oxidized and fruitier than extant versions. The wine became a sensation. Unlike those of Vecchio Samperi, sales of Bukkuram were brisk. While most Sicilians winemakers in search of quality adopted international, particularly French, vine varieties and techniques and made wines stylistically similar to French ones, De Bartoli celebrated the raw materials of Sicily.
THE DIEGO PLANETA ERA AT THE IRVV
In 1985, Diego Planeta assumed a role that put him at the center of the Sicilian style and quality revolution of the 1990s. He became president of the Istituto Regionale della Vite e del Vino (IRVV, “Regional Institute of Vine and Wine"). The mission of the IRVV, a state-owned company founded in the early 1950s by the region of Sicily, is to help the Sicilian wine industry improve viticulture, wine production, and marketing techniques. The IRVV is charged with conducting research and making it available to all Sicilian grape farmers and wine producers. The timing of Planeta's presidency was crucial. In the early and mid-1980s the Sicilian wine industry was drowning in a sea of low-quality wine without any solution in sight.
The selection of Planeta was revolutionary. Putting an entrepreneur and the president of a winery in this position gave the IRVV the opportunity to move in a dynamic direction. Through his work at Settesoli, Planeta had an intimate understanding of cooperative associations and the political dynamics of the EU, Italian, and regional controls and subsidies. He understood both the bulk and the quality wine markets. The results of the IRVV research were made available to sectors of the Sicilian wine industry.
During the 1960s and 1970s the IRVV put in place the initial scaffolding to support research focused on assessing new technologies, which it made available to vine growers and wine producers. Bruno Pastena, a professor of viticulture at the University of Palermo, in Sicily's west, and Carlo Nicolosi Asmundo, a professor of enology at the University of Catania, in the east, were focal points of this research and its related scientific dialogue. Then, in the 1970s, Nicola Trapani began his long research and teaching career at the Technical Agrarian Institute in Marsala. He, Pastena, and Asmundo became the teachers of the key generation of winegrowers and enologists who would renovate the Sicilian wine industry.
At the beginning of the 1980s, there were stirrings that set the stage for the revolutionary perspectives and great achievements of Planeta's IRVV presidency. In those years, the IRVV agronomist Vincenzo Melia, with the help and guidance of Pastena, set up a program that placed experimental vineyards throughout Sicily starting in 1984. These vineyards tested not only viticultural techniques but also the potential of Sicily's native varieties and those varieties in the process of a rapid international diffusion, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Chardonnay, mostly selected and perfected in France. The early results were so exciting that they gave impetus to larger strides.
The year after Planeta became the president of the IRVV, he set up a collaborative program between it and the Istituto Agrario di San Michele all'Adige (IASMA), Italy's foremost viticultural and enological research institute. Attilio Scienza, a professor at the University of Milan and a leading expert in the selection of clones and vine varieties, was then the IASMA's general director. The University of Palermo and Marsala's Istituto Tecnico Agrario ("Technical Agrarian Institute") were also actively involved in the research. The Menfi area became the focus of their viticultural experimentation, particularly the vineyards owned by members of the Settesoli cooperative. The IRVV and the IASMA studied the performance of fifty varieties, both native and international, which were grafted onto diverse rootstocks and farmed using diverse training systems.
In 1990 the IRVV rented a small space at the Spadafora winery at Virzi for research microvinifications. Soon 250 were under way. Grapes culled from the experimental vineyards were brought to Virzi, where technicians of the IRVV and the IASMA studied their vinification and the resulting wines. According to Scienza, the most interesting varieties from these studies were Fiano, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah. Blends of these wines and native varieties were studied to determine the best partnerships. When the initial results were in, the IRVV invited groups of thirty Sicilian wine producers at a time to taste the experimental wines and to discuss them with IRVV technicians. To fill the first thirty seats, the IRVV sent out 150 invitations. According to Planeta, only about ten producers accepted, and only three attended, representing Tasca d'Almerita, Settesoli, and the new Planeta winery. Soon, however, interest in what the IRVV was doing spread. Wine producers who did not want to be left out of the excitement started their own experimental vineyards, which they linked to the IRVVs work. Sicily's most important winery of the 1980s, Duca di Salaparuta, did not participate. In general, the IRVV was more active in western than eastern Sicily.
Planeta believed that he had to open the eyes of Sicilians to what was going on beyond Sicily. He knew that if quality wine was to be developed, Sicily would have to compete on the world stage. He sent members of an IRVV committee that was composed of mayors, winery owners, heads of cooperatives, and so forth with several IRVV employees to the Trento province of northern Italy to visit the IASMA. Faculty members and researchers exposed them to the latest viticultural and enological technologies. Planeta also organized a group of young Sicilian enologists to be trained as the vanguard for the island's new quality wine industry. He directed them to spend the first year of their program observing the innovation