The present quality wine market crisis should be seen in the context of a structural problem that cannot be fixed easily. Small landholders grow the grapes that make up 80 percent of the volume of Sicilian wine. Most sell their harvests to cooperative wineries. The other 20 percent mainly comes from a small number of large, privately owned Sicilian wine companies that each produce more than one million bottles annually. There are few midsize or small companies. Unfortunately, a few large, private companies seem to have benefited the most from the Sicilian quality wine revolution of the 1990s. The Italian economy has been weakening, and total Italian wine consumption has been decreasing gradually. Large Sicilian producers who were able to establish dependable relationships with importers in growing export markets are in the best position to profit.
In the first decade of the new millennium, the importance of marketing began to overwhelm individual opportunity. While the midsection of the Sicilian wine industry has not developed, the bottom segment may be heading toward what looks like a cliff. What can be done with the excess Sicilian bulk wine produced annually, nearly all of which moves through the cooperative system? European taxpayers in the past have paid to destroy such excess wine production by distillation, extirpation, and vendemmia verde. Such strategies have put tens of thousands of farmers, as well as thousands of workers in connected industries, on life-support systems. There have been some encouraging signs that Sicily is moving forward to address these structural challenges. First, Sicily’s total vineyard surface area has declined by 29,653 hectares (73,274 acres) or 21 percent in the ten-year period from 2001 to 2011. Second, for the 2012 vintage Sicily did not request a vendemmia verde contribution from the EU.
Will the Sicilian wine industry downsize enough before the road paved with subsidies comes to an end? EU policies that have kept these vineyards in existence are increasingly diminishing. For instance, the crisis distillation scheme is scheduled to be phased out at the end of the 2012–13 season. Will thousands of grape farmers and workers at cooperative wineries adjust quickly enough? Or will they all be swept away, leaving families without incomes or work, fields of untended vines and weeds, and ruined, vacated wineries? My greatest fear is that Sicilians’ collective Achilles’s heel—their reluctance to collaborate and coordinate—will reassert its power and allow this bountiful land to fall into the hands of a few, perhaps even investors from outside. And Sicily’s cycling domination of a few over the many will continue. May Sicilians protect their patrimony and make their own future!
4
PERPETUAL WINE
About ten years ago, Giacomo Ansaldi bought and restored the nineteenth-century Baglio dei Florio, on a rocky plain that overlooks the vineyards of the contradas Birgi and Spagnola, the Stagnone saltworks and nature reserve, the island of Mozia, the Egadi Islands, Erice, and Marsala. Baglio is an Italian word for a rectangular building enclosing a central courtyard. The Florio family had built this structure amid their vineyards to house equipment, employees, and, during the height of the harvest, the family itself. To avoid trademark infringement with today’s Florio Marsala wine company, also no longer owned by the namesake family, Ansaldi renamed the building Baglio Donna Franca, after Franca Florio, the vivacious and stylish wife of Ignazio Florio III. Today Donna Franca comprises both a hotel-restaurant and Ansaldi’s boutique winery, La Divina.
On our visit to La Divina, we tasted wines out of barrel with Giacomo in the basement cellar. We faced a lineup of eight large oak barrels supporting a layer of seven on top. An impish smile spread over Giacomo’s face. He tossed me a piece of chalk. “Taste them and write your notes on the barrels. You are the master. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
He climbed the spiral staircase that ascended into the winery. A door opened. Voices and the clang of metal against metal flowed down like water into the cool, still air of the cellar. This being early September, the harvest was in progress. The tanks in the winery were filled with “boiling” musts, turbulent, bubbling grape juice at the most active point in fermentation. There was much for Giacomo to do. He closed the door behind him with a decisive thud. Silence. We were alone in his nursery of perpetual wines.
Vino perpetuo means “perpetual wine.” It is perpetual because its high alcohol content, 16 to 18 percent, makes it stable and because whatever is consumed is replenished with younger wine. Hence it goes on forever. Just as cheese is a way of preserving milk, vino perpetuo is a method of preserving wine. Its existence as a wine type probably goes back further than historical records can take us.
Small farmer families near the western coastline of Sicily still maintain vino perpetuo a casa (“at home”). Its flavor is unique, serendipitous, and essentially familiar because it results from where and how it is kept. The decisions of generations of individual family members become embedded in the wine. Overmature Grillo grapes are the preferred materia prima because this native variety is the most likely to yield wine with the presence and body to endure extended aging. When harvested late, Grillo grapes have higher sugar levels than other Marsala grapes. The result is higher alcohol in the wine.
Though each vino perpetuo is unique, their exposure to oxygen through barrel staves and bungholes causes reactions that lead to similarities in color, smell, and taste. Each is amber in color and powerfully nutty and airplane-gluey (the latter from ethyl acetate) in smell. Sicily’s dry climate causes water to evaporate faster than alcohol. As a result, the wine’s alcohol percentage rises above 16 percent, which adds a fiery, “hot” taste. Grillo grape skins and pulp contain unusually high potassium levels. Normally potassium means a wine is less acidic in taste, but most of Grillo’s acidity remains fixed. The resulting potassium salts may account for a subliminal perception of salt. Mediterranean Sea spray landing on the grapes—which are not washed before vinification—enhances that salinity.
Earlier in the day, Giacomo had brought us to the shoreline several miles north of the port of Marsala. “Qui nasce il perpetuo” (“Here is born the perpetual wine”), he proclaimed as he braked his silver Mercedes wagon. He pointed over his left shoulder at the other side of the road, where there was a sprawling vineyard with low green-leafed vine bushes scattered higgledy-piggledy in black soil. Giacomo next pointed to our right. “Over there is the Stagnone Lagoon and the island of Mozia.” Alongside the lagoon were mounds of shining white crystals covered by red roofing tiles. “That is sea salt, the best in Sicily.” Then there was the lagoon. Lines of rocks crisscrossed it, creating a checkerboard of muted shades of blue, green, and violet. He explained that the sun and the wind caused the water to evaporate rapidly in the shallow square pools, concentrating the seawater until a salt residue was all that was left. Workers collected the salt, piled it on the mounds, and protected it from wind and rain with the roofing tiles. Windmills punctuated the scene, their bony sails pinwheeling in the steady breeze. In the Marsala area, winds blow three hundred days a year. The mills grind the salt before it is sold. Across the lagoon was Mozia, a low-lying island of green with a few buildings visible. Beyond that was the Mediterranean Sea.
Giacomo pointed to the island. “The Phoenicians, then the Carthaginians had an important trading settlement there from 700 to 400 B.C. The whole island is covered with ruins of buildings. In a museum on the island, you can see clay jars that must have once contained wine. Vases and cups showing images of grapes and people drinking wine show that they enjoyed wine. More than likely, the inhabitants grew grapes along the coastline, probably in this field right here.” He waved his hand at the vineyard on the other side of the road.
Looking up as if he could see something in the sky, he said, “My dream is that my vino perpetuo will be born here. I want to buy this vineyard. The vines, nearly all Grillo, are very old, some nearly one hundred years old. I will make the wine, then barrel it. As it becomes old, I will bottle some and then replace what I draw out with young wine from this same vineyard.”
At first glance it was hard to believe the vines were that old, because they looked like small leafy bushes, or alberelli. “Look at this one!” He raised a mound of leaves to show us the ankles of