The World of Sicilian Wine. Bill Nesto

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ about the state of Sicilian viticulture and the great cause of long-overdue land reform.²⁷ She argued that in order for Sicily to realize its promise as an important wine-exporting region of Italy, the government would have to do much more than simply replant vineyards devastated by phylloxera. Above all, according to Mario, it had a political and moral duty to save Sicily's agricultural economy by supporting productive land use and the intensive cultivation required for grapevines, olives, and fruit trees. She argued in favor of the legislation proposed by Prime Minister Crispi to Parliament in 1894 that would have forced the largest landowners (latifondisti) to enter into long-term leases (enfiteusi) with local tenant farmers for medium parcels, ranging from twelve to fifty acres. It also would have provided tenant farmers with fair credit terms and tax breaks. However, Parliament left for its summer break before taking up debate on this legislation, which it ignored on its return. When he came to power in 1896, Prime Minister di Rudinì did not betray his aristocratic class or large landowning constituents. He could have championed the cause of land reform, but he did not. It would be another half century before significant land reform was implemented in Sicily.

      THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1900–1950): THE EMBERS DIE OUT

      From 1901 to 1913 Sicily lost more than 30 percent of its agricultural work force to mass emigration to the United States, Argentina, Australia, and other distant countries. Both vineyard acreage and total wine production steadily diminished in the first decade of the twentieth century. When phylloxera infested the vineyards of Salemi and Marsala in 1898, the Marsala industry did what the French wine industry had done twenty-five years earlier. Marsala traders went to the international bulk wine market for substitutes for the local wine. During the first decade of the twentieth century, they imported bulk wines from Apulia, Sardinia, and Tunisia and made concoctions that were supposed to resemble local base wines. As a result, the quality of Marsala was compromised and its image began to suffer. At the same time, a wave of consolidation blurred the identities of Marsala's most famous houses. In 1904 the Florio Marsala company joined with eight other Marsala producers to form a larger company, named, two years later, the Società Vinicola Florio. By 1924 the Cinzano company controlled it. As of 1929 this larger company had purchased the Marsala houses of Woodhouse and Ingham-Whitaker. Though Cinzano successfully restructured and improved product quality and sales, there was a proliferation of small companies making low-cost, low-quality Marsala. The loss of its great names signaled the end of Marsala's golden century.

      At the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign wine merchants sought out table wines more than vini da taglio. With little interest from French or British buyers, Sicilian wine producers turned to other markets, particularly northern Italy, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Argentina. Success in the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Swiss markets was in part determined by the same phenomenon that had stimulated France's interest in Sicilian wine: the spread of phylloxera, which arrived in these countries later than in France but earlier than in Sicily. As these countries restored their vineyards, Sicilians had more difficultly entering their markets. Sicilian producers wanting to export now also had the healthy French wine industry and the recovering Spanish wine industry to contend with. And they faced more problems. In 1904 the Austro-Hungarian Empire closed its borders to Italian goods because of a deteriorating political relationship between the two countries. France and Spain were strong competitors for the German and Swiss markets. World War I destroyed the German market. Beginning in 1919, Prohibition in the United States eliminated what had been another promising market. By 1920, vineyard acreage island-wide had declined to its lowest point since the mid-nineteenth century. The Italian government of 1920 to 1924 imposed heavy taxation on wine. During this period, taxes accounted for 43 percent of the cost of a hectoliter (twenty-six gallons) of Etna wine.

      Between the two World Wars, Sicily's vineyard acreage increased. Italy's entry into World War II on the side of the Germans in 1940 interrupted Sicily's commerce until British and U.S. forces liberated the island in 1943. The volume of Sicilian wine production was 6,900,000 hectoliters (182,278,716 gallons) in 1938. In 1949 this had dropped to 3,790,000 hectoliters (100,121,208 gallons). After World War II there was also another mass emigration of agricultural manpower, this time to northern Italy, which offered jobs in heavy industry.

      By 1950 the Sicilian wine industry had lost almost everything it had achieved during the nineteenth century. The Marsala trade opened the nineteenth century with the potential to increase in size and reputation, which it had largely fulfilled by 1900. But fifty years later Marsala had tied itself too closely to sweet concoctions designed for sale to bakers and the processed food industry. Moreover, from 1950 to 2000, consumer tastes gradually moved away from oxidized, fortified wines. The large-scale vino 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 СКАЧАТЬ