The World of Sicilian Wine. Bill Nesto

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СКАЧАТЬ in seventeenth-century Sicily comes directly from the written works of two other distinguished Sicilian clergymen, Francisco Cupani and Paolo Boccone. Cupani was a Franciscan botanist in charge of a botanical garden outside Palermo. He is the author of a book titled Hortus Catholicus ("Catholic Garden"), which was published in 1696 and formally classified Sicilian plant and vine varieties. Boccone was a Cistercian monk from a noble family who, prior to his entry into the Cistercian order, had been a professor of botany at the University of Padua and the official botanist for the grand duke of Tuscany. He wrote more than a dozen respected works on botany, including a classification of Sicilian flora.

      At the end of the eighteenth century, a Sicilian clergyman named Abbot Paolo Balsamo became the first professor of agricultural science and political economy at the Royal Academy in Palermo. Balsamo had spent three years studying advanced agricultural methods and rural economics in England and France. He returned to Sicily armed with the conviction that his island home was capable of achieving agricultural excellence, asserting that if Sicily were “cultivated with the same attention and care with which England, for example, is cultivated, it would certainly produce at least four times more than it does at present.”⁴⁶ In a published journal reporting on the state of agriculture in Sicily in 1808, Balsamo exhorted Sicily's landowners and farmers to dedicate themselves to “every sort of useful cultivation” based upon a “real love of the soil.”⁴⁷ He describes a former feudal property that had been divided by order of the Bourbon king among many small tenant farmers. Prior to this division, the land “was wild and desert, and nearly a third of it barren and uncultivated, and from that time it has so changed in appearance and become so rich in farm houses, trees and shrubs of various sorts, that it may now be called one continued village, and one of the most delightful retreats. . . [, and] of the plantations that of the vine is beyond comparison the chief.”⁴⁸ From this experience, Balsamo concluded that “the culture of the vine is superior in effective value to that of corn,” provided that the soil is adapted to it, the land is not too expensive, and the wine finds a ready market at a reasonable price.⁴⁹

      A Sicilian baron named Filippo Nicosia was one of Sicily's truly noble farmers. In 1735 this baron of Sangiaime published a manual on arboriculture that distilled decades of his personal observations and field experience. The book, called II Podere Fruttifero e Dilettevole ("The Fruitful and Delightful Farm"), paid homage to the glories of the fruit orchard and the cultivation of grapevines (probably not a book in the Leopard's library). As a young man, Baron Nicosia had inherited his country estate in the center of Sicily (near Enna), and instead of taking up residence in Catania, where his noble family had its origins, he went to live on and improve his farmland. He was among the first Sicilians, following Venuto, Cupani, and Boccone, to treat the science of agriculture in a serious written work. He understood that agriculture was the foundation of Sicily's wealth, and he dedicated himself to its betterment. Baron Nicosia represented the ancient Greco-Roman ideal of the agricola pius, who appreciated the fruits of his own labors. In tending his trees and vines with his own hands, he could never have been mistaken by any latter-day Odysseus as part of that arrogant race of Cyclops who planted nothing and plied no plows. While the Age of Enlightenment largely bypassed Sicily, there were Sicilians of both noble and humble birth who advanced their island's culture and carried the torch for Sicily during these wine-dark centuries.

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      THE LOST OPPORTUNITY

      1775 to 1950

      In 1774 a Florentine named Domenico Sestini came to Sicily to study the island's indigenous vine varieties, wine regions, and wines. A little less than forty years later he delivered a series of lectures titled “Recollections of Sicilian Wines” (Memorie sui vini siciliani) to the prestigious Florentine society of agronomists 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 СКАЧАТЬ