The World of Sicilian Wine. Bill Nesto

and scientists known as the Georgofili Academy. Sestini had gone to Catania at the age of twenty-four as the guest of Ignazio Paternò. In addition to studying the written works of the historian Tomaso Fazello and the botanists Francisco Cupani and Paolo Boccone in Paternò's vast library, Sestini spent three years traveling the island and studying its soil, climate, viticulture, and vinification methods. Unfortunately, the treatise that is thought to be the culmination of his study is no longer in existence. In his first lecture, Sestini declared that Sicilian wines had been prized since antiquity for their “exquisiteness and richness” and that he would report on seven subregions: Mascali (Etna), Vittoria, Syracuse/Augusta, Castelvetrano, Milazzo, Messina, and Catania.¹ By the end of the third lecture he had covered only two, Mascali and Vittoria. Sestini began his third lecture, about the wines of Vittoria, with a rebuke to his Tuscan audience: any “Turk,” he told them, would be interested in what he had to say, even if these Florentines were not!² Originally, Sestini had intended to give at least seven lectures to the academy, but the evident disrespect for Sicilian wine among his audience persuaded him that his observations would be better kept to himself.

      While the late eighteenth century saw the growth of its wine industry, Sicily at that time still had not overcome many of its historic socioeconomic challenges. In the early 1700s Sicily barely had its own merchant fleet—only about twenty of its ships were capable of reaching even Genoa. From the late eighteenth to the early part of the nineteenth century, the British fleet's need for wine supplies allowed Sicily to sell enormous quantities of wine without need of its own merchant fleet. When Admiral Horatio Nelson left Sicily for the Nile in 1798 to fight an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte, he took more than forty thousand gallons of Sicilian wine.³ The Sicilian wine industry was dependent on the British fleet and on foreign merchants and their ships until the early nineteenth century.

      Giovanni Attilio Arnolfini, an economist from Lucca, in a 1768 visit to Sicily identified the principal areas of both its production and its export of wine as Castelvetrano, Marsala, Castellammare del Golfo, Alcamo, Vittoria, Mascali, Milazzo, and Syracuse.⁴ More specifically, he noted that the white wines of Castelvetrano were shipped to Genoa and Gibraltar, the red wines of Vittoria were sent to Livorno, and wines from the Modica area and Augusta in southeast Sicily and the wines from Mascali, north of Catania, went to Malta.⁵

      While Sestini praised Sicily as being capable of producing fine and stable wines, it lacked an indigenous wine culture that valued both careful viticulture and enology. In 1786, Pietro Lanza—an ancestor of the Tasca d'Almerita family, the owners of Regaleali and other wine brands—published his prescription for the deficiencies of Sicilian agriculture, “An Account of the Decline of Sicilian Agriculture and the Way to Remedy It” (Memoria sulla decadenza dell'agricoltura siciliana e il modo di rimediarvi). He recognized that the bounty of Sicilian harvests had attracted the attention of foreign merchants but that indiscriminate harvesting practices, including rough handling of the grapes, and a lack of cleanliness in the winemaking process compromised wine quality.

      BRITISH INFLUENCE

      Entrepreneurship landed on Sicily's west coast in the late eighteenth century. In 1770 John Woodhouse, an Englishman, arrived at the port of Marsala looking to increase the exports of sodium carbonate, widely used in the production of glass and soap. Well before Woodhouse arrived in Sicily, British merchants had played a pivotal role in the development of the fortified wines Sherry and Madeira. Fortification (the addition of spirits) ensured stability during transport by ship.

      After tasting the local wine, Woodhouse realized that he could make a less expensive version of Madeira for British consumers. He perceived the potential of the local grapes. They were inexpensive. Labor was both plentiful and inexpensive. Other British entrepreneurs, such as Benjamin Ingham and John Hopps, followed in his wake. They saw the market opportunity to sell popular wine styles made in Sicily at a time when some of Britain's other supplier countries, such as France, were subject to an embargo during the naval blockade against Napoleon. They brought with them something even rarer in Sicily than capital: the spirit of enterprise, the understanding of commerce, the knowledge of markets, and the ethos of industry and collaboration. They also brought a market-driven standard of consistency to Sicilian winemaking. They fronted money so Sicilian farmers could expand their vineyards and improve the quality of their grapes. They hired and otherwise supported innumerable Sicilians by investing in the farming, the production, and the transport of Marsala wine. They also invested in the infrastructure of the town of Marsala. Woodhouse built the first of a series of jetties that improved the harbor of Marsala for shipping and transport. The British entrepreneurs also rented and built structures to house their businesses and improved roads to facilitate the transport of goods in and out of the town of Marsala.

      By 1805, Thomas Jefferson had procured a pipe (a barrel that holds four hundred liters [106 gallons]) of Woodhouse's Marsala wine for his Monticello wine cellar through the office of the U.S. secretary of the navy. In a thank-you letter to a representative of the navy, Jefferson wrote, “I received the hogshead of Marsala wine you were so kind as to send me. Altho’ not yet fined (which operation I always leave to time), I perceive it is an excellent wine, and well worthy of being laid in stocks to acquire age.”⁶ Ingham, who followed Woodhouse in 1806, wrote a handbook that prescribed improvements in viticultural and enological practices for Sicilian winegrowers. In the early nineteenth century, he was already shipping Marsala wine to local agents in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

      From 1806 to 1815, Britain stationed its army on Sicily to defend the Bourbon kingdom against a possible invasion by Napoleon and to block the French from controlling the central Mediterranean. This strengthened the Sicilian political clout of the British Marsala merchants, who had also lent money to the Bourbon king. Their influence was so great that when the town of Marsala asked the Bourbon government if it could levy an exportation tax on the producers of Marsala, the government refused.

      Beginning in the period of their occupation of Sicily and then rule of the nearby island of Malta, the British also helped to fuel demand for the inexpensive table wines (vini da pasto) from the ports of Riposto, Messina, and Milazzo in northeastern Sicily. Their navy, under Nelson's command, recognized the stability of Sicilian wine on long sea voyages. During the Napoleonic wars, the British navy became a flagship customer for both Marsala and the red table wines from eastern Sicily. As a colony of the British Empire, Malta served as a shipping depot for larger British merchant ships plying the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. By 1824 it was the principal export destination for ships originating from Riposto, about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) northeast of Catania, that carried much of the wines and other products of eastern Sicily. By 1850, Riposto exported almost as much wine annually as did Marsala.

      SICILIAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM TAKES ROOT

      The British merchants, with their values and innovations, served as models for Sicilians to emulate. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a great expansion of the Sicilian wine industry. For example, by 1824 more than 90 percent of the cargo ships departing for Malta from Riposto were built by local shipbuilders and owned by merchants and investors from eastern Sicily. In addition to the table wines and other produce of Mascali, the ships of Riposto transported chestnut wine barrels and vats made from wood harvested on the slopes of Mount Etna. A traveler's guide published in Sicily in 1859 identified the island's most highly regarded wine-producing areas: Milazzo, Bagheria (just east of Palermo), Partinico, Alcamo, Castellammare, Castelvetrano, Vittoria, Syracuse, Mascali, “terre forti” (the low southern slopes of Etna where strong, full-bodied wines were made), Savoca (between Taormina and Messina, south of the Faro area, which had been famous for wine since the turn of the nineteenth century), and, of course, Marsala.⁷ Before then, the only wine producers to become famous had come from Marsala and made fortified wine. There was, however, one exception.

      In 1824, Giuseppe Alliata, the duke of Salaparuta, near Palermo, began bottling estate wines at his Villa Valguarnera at Bagheria. At first he bottled them for family use and to share his winemaking triumphs with his guests. The wines, a dry white, a dry red, and a sweet wine, were considered French in style because of their delicate taste. They were later named Corvo, after the contrada ("neighborhood") where the grapes originated. The wines of Duca di Salaparuta would be Sicily's beacons