8

ENOLOGY IN SICILY

During his travels through Sicily in the late eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed that the “oil and the wine are also good, but would be even better if prepared with greater care.”1 Sicilian winegrowers throughout history have maintained a deep connection to viticulture that has kept them in step with existing viticultural technologies. Their understanding of enology, however, lacked the sophistication found in mainland Italy and certainly in France and Germany. This deficiency is consistent with Sicily’s historic inability to transform its high-quality raw materials into finished products. Only after the mid-1990s did Sicilian winemaking practices reach parity with those of the sophisticated wine industries of the world.

EARLY SICILIAN ENOLOGY

While the grapes the ancient Greeks grew resembled the grapes we eat today in look and taste, their wines bore little resemblance to present-day ones. From what we know about their techniques, their wines must have quickly oxidized after alcoholic fermentation. They covered wine oxidation and other flaws with the addition of seawater, spices, and other substances. The problem of oxidation and flaws due to a lack of hygiene confronted not only the Greek Sicilians but also the Romans and all of the European wine cultures that followed. It was not until after Louis Pasteur, in the mid-nineteenth century, studied the role of microbes and oxygen in fermentation and maturation that producers could make great technical strides in controlling wine production.

Italians have always regarded the French as the masters of wine production. Though the French imported an enormous quantity of raw Sicilian wine during the nineteenth century, they had neither invested in nor educated the Sicilian wine industry. Italian private and public institutions were studying and reporting about French enology then, but their writings had little impact on what was practiced in Sicily, although several Sicilian nobles, members of that era’s sophisticated and cosmopolitan class, imported French technology and hired French consultants. After the 1990s, Sicilian producers paid attention to Australian viticulture and enology since they recognized that Australia had a climate similar to theirs and had developed sophisticated technology that transformed harvests into easy-to-sell, international-style wine.

Sicilian wine technology evolved much more slowly than that of the rest of Europe. One example of a missed opportunity occurred in 1802, when the Sicilian physician and poet Giovanni Meli, in a letter to Saverio Landolina Nava of Syracuse, recommended a vinification methodology that the Prince of Butera and the Prince of Cattolica had successfully used.2 Meli described terra-cotta and cement vats at the villa of the Prince of Butera at Bagheria, a town close to Palermo. Each vat had a small hole at the top and a wooden hatch near the base. The method of fermentation he described was to let the skins, stems, and pulp macerate for fifteen days, to drain the wine off the skins, to clean out the vats, and to put the wine back in until it was ready for sale. These vats could be hermetically sealed, to limit the access of oxygen. Meli saw the value of this for fermentation and maturation at a time when most technicians in Sicily believed that wine needed unrestricted contact with air. Landolina Nava separately described a red wine producer working in the Faro area who had conical open-topped oak fermentation tanks of a design similar to one still used in Bordeaux.³ At the end of a nine-day maceration period, at the moment when it lost the aroma of fruit juice, this producer racked the wine off its sediments. The equipment and methods that Meli and Landolina Nava described became commonplace in twentieth-century enology. Unfortunately, their efforts to advance Sicilian enology had little impact in their time.

Before the twentieth century most Sicilians drank amber-colored white wines, copper-tinted rosato wines, or red wines that were coarse textured, alcoholic, and slightly sweet. These wines were probably oxidized, if not faulty in other ways. The nobility preferred imported table wines of all types, most of which were made in France. Except for Giuseppe Alliata, they had little interest in consuming local wine besides Marsala, let alone making it. During the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, foreign markets, most importantly the British, imported Marsala and Sicilian table wines, principally red. The table wines that they wanted were fresher, less alcoholic, and drier than the ones Sicilian commoners preferred. Besides Marsala, Sicily’s most recognized wine was a very sweet white, Moscato di Siracusa.

The nineteenth century saw a worldwide explosion in wine consumption and wine trading. The traditional winemaking areas of Europe were in regions where vintage quality and harvest volume varied from year to year. Sicily became an important source of vino da taglio (“cutting wine”). It was mostly red and was used by northern Italian and French producers as an additive to reduce wine variation and to give wines a competitive edge with respect to depth of color and degree of alcohol and astringency. Vino da taglio was dark violet, high in alcohol, high in astringency, and sometimes slightly sweet. When the French imported Sicilian vino da taglio during their phylloxera crisis, they preferred to buy it as freshly fermented as possible, even when it was still fermenting and slightly sweet. If the wine was transported in the last stages of fermentation, the remaining active yeasts would preserve it until it reached cellars in France. The French also wanted wines rich in tannins, which would better preserve the wine during shipment. Once it was in France, technicians cleaned up and otherwise adjusted the wine by racking it off the lees and fining, filtering, and sulfiting it. As a result, the Sicilian producers of vino da taglio did not develop expertise in stabilizing, blending, or aging wine. At the same time, from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century many Sicilians developed a taste for vino da taglio, which they called superalcolici. This demand retarded the development of fine Sicilian table wine (vino da pasto) because it pushed the Sicilian wine ethos toward alcoholic and rough wines. French and northern Italian merchants returned in the mid-twentieth century for more of the booster vino da taglio, but its trade began diminishing in the 1970s and petered out during the 1990s.

It was the English who invested in Sicilians and the Sicilian wine industry. They introduced the technology for producing fortified wines. The base wines that were needed for Marsala were high in alcohol and oxidized. Delicacy of texture was not an important factor for these wines. However, when English merchants bought unfortified Sicilian table wine for resale, they sought more delicate ones, both red and white. The evolution of wine technology and changing consumer preferences began to marginalize the fortified wine market after the middle of the twentieth century. The most durable “technologies” that the English brought to Sicily turned out to be wine entrepreneurialism and the know-how to conduct international trade.

Before the twentieth century there were few Sicilian vineyards planted to single varieties, let alone to just white or just red vine varieties. Red and white grapes were often harvested and vinified together, creating a range of wine colors from golden to amber to pale red. In the Marsala area, the table wine of farmer families was ambrato, made from a mix of red and white grapes. According to Notizie e Studi intorno Ai Vini ed Alle Uve d’Italia (1896), the Palermo area, for example, was known for “golden” wines made from blends of Catarratto, a white grape, and Perricone, a red one.4 The historic Etna red wine blend contained white grapes from white vine varieties that were planted in small numbers among the Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio, the principal red varieties. At the end of the eighteenth century, King Ferdinand III of Sicily sent the Apulian wine technician Felice Lioy to Sicily to improve its abysmal wine production. Lioy worked in the northwest from 1789 to 1812. Among other recommendations, he proposed the separate harvesting and vinification of white grapes and red grapes. His prescriptions, presented in his book Memoria per la manipolazione dei vini (1800), became a catechism for wine producers, particularly Benjamin Ingham, who thirty years later included Lioy’s advice in an instructional booklet used at his Marsala house.5 When white grapes were harvested separately from red ones, there was the possibility of making both white and red wines, as well as rosatos (which during the twentieth century came to be made from red grapes alone). The separate vinification of red and white grapes became increasingly common during the nineteenth century.

At harvest time, workers brought baskets of grapes to palmentos. A palmento was the area where freshly harvested grapes were crushed and where the juice underwent alcoholic fermentation. In western Sicily, larger farm complexes called baglios housed the palmentos. The walls of the palmento were very thick, to buffer rapid temperature changes. Stone floors transmitted the cool temperature of the earth. Palmentos in some regions, such as Etna, were built to make use of gravity: their reception area was elevated, and subsequent processes occurred at lower elevations.

Rarely were grapes preselected before processing. One such rarity was noted by the British consul William Stigand, who described the grape bunches at the Hood estate at Castello Maniace being destalked “on a series of dressers, such as are used in the Gironde.”⁶ Harvesters traditionally carried their loaded baskets up opposing stairways that ran along the outer wall of the palmento and converged on one or two open windows. Through these windows they unloaded the baskets onto a stone floor that sloped down gradually to shallow fermenting tanks hollowed into the floor. These tanks had walls of calcareous stone fitted together with a calcareous terra-cotta mortar. They were of the size needed to accommodate the annual volume of each grower’s harvest.

The most common grape-processing method used in the palmentos was called pesta-imbotta or pestimbotta, which means “to crush and put in cask.” The crushing of fresh grapes (red, white, or both together) was done rapidly and before fermentation occurred. Once the harvesters had dumped the bunches onto the palmento floor, a team of crushers trod the grapes underfoot. Until the middle of the twentieth century, they wore leather shoes with soles fitted with metal studs. The soles did not have heels. The pressure of crushing was spread out and extended throughout the bottom of the foot. The studs bruised the stems and skins and ruptured the seeds. Usually the shoes were not cleaned before or after use. During the late nineteenth century, some producers making fine wine required pressers to wear soft-soled moccasins or use bare feet. Prince Baucina at La Contessa even insisted that pressers clean their feet before getting to work. A handful of producers, such as Henri d’Orleans at Zucco and Alexander Nelson Hood, had teams of workers who destemmed the grapes by hand. Thus bitter substances in the stems were discarded before alcohol could extract them. At Zucco, La Contessa, and Corvo at Casteldaccia, machines pressed white grapes before fermentation. These machines were of French construction and delicately pressed the grapes, allowing the resulting wines to be delicate in texture.

Commonly during the pestimbotta process, the crushers would sprinkle a white powder (calcium sulfate, referred to as gesso) on the bunches and crushed grapes. This was also added later, during alcoholic fermentation. Gesso increased the strength of the acidity, making the wine sourer and helping to preserve it from bacterial attack. During the late nineteenth century this practice was discontinued because gesso was thought to be harmful when consumed. Later this usage was shown to be harmless, though by that time tartaric acid had made gesso obsolete.

The pestimbotta process was essentially the same for white and rosato production. It was modified for red winemaking. The basic pestimbotta method intermixed white and red grapes. After the pressing of the grapes underfoot, the juice was fermented off its skins in a tank built into the ground. For more sophisticated wine, the white grapes were separated from the red and there was a distinction between white, rosato, and red wine production. White wine production had less aggressive crushing and pressing and few, if any, pressed bunches added to the fermentation that followed the initial pressing. The juice from the pressed grapes drained into a tank, where it underwent the tumultuous part of fermentation. After a day or two, when most of its sugar had transformed into alcohol, the juice was transported or drained into barrels, in which it finished fermenting. In 1800, Lioy described how unfermented juice was continuously mixed with juice in more advanced stages of fermentation in the must.7 This suggests that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the common fermentation process was continuous rather than a batch process and saw wine continuously drained from the tank and put into barrel. More sophisticated vinification was done in batches so that all the grapes in the vat were at the same stage of fermentation.

White wines were amber colored, due to the initial skin contact and oxidation. In eastern Sicily, where the grape mix was red dominant, a wine made with no skin contact after the initial crush was called a pistammutta, dialect for pestimbotta. A pistammutta wine was essentially a rosato. After the grapes were pressed, their juice fermented tumultuously for one or two days in tank and was then put into barrels, where it completed fermentation. This wine was for local consumption. Today Alice Bonaccorsi and Rosario Pappalardo pay homage to pistammutta with their Etna rosato RossoRelativo. They place freshly harvested Nerello Mascalese bunches in a cool area for twenty hours. During that time, color seeps from the skins into the pulp. Then they machine-press the grapes, ferment the juice without temperature control, and bottle it. Though it is difficult for me to mentally reconstruct the flavor of a nineteenth-century Etna pistammutta, the RossoRelativo I tasted was drier, much cleaner, and less bitter than I imagine a nineteenth-century rosato would have been.

When red wines were desired, as was often the case in eastern Sicily and the export market, the pestimbotta process was modified. Pressed red grapes were added to the fermenting must. The amount of the pressed grapes added to the fermentation vat in the palmento and the length of the maceration in tank depended on the style of wine desired by the purchaser or the locals who would consume it. The pressers waded into the mass of fermenting skins and juice to increase the extraction of color and tannins. They were known to clutch or be tied to ropes that dangled from the ceiling. This was to keep them from falling into the must due to asphyxiation as the carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas that fermentation emitted replaced the air. Red wines with increasingly more color and structure were commonly referred to as “twelve-hour,” “twenty-four-hour,” and “forty-eight-hour,” for the amount of time that the fermenting must had been in contact with the crushed grapes. The traditional vini da taglio were closest to forty-eight-hour. If its red grapes were deeply colored and very ripe, forty-eight-hour wines could be dark and concentrated. Nero Pachino vini da taglio sold to merchants for blending were forty-eight-hour wines.

The juice liberated from the mound of grapes crushed underfoot drained through stone-carved channels, down a tube, and out a spout into the shallow fermenting tank below. After the chorus of workers singing traditional harvest songs had sufficiently stomped on the bunches, on the call of their leader they would rearrange the smashed bunches into a shallow pile using a hoelike instrument and stomp on them some more. At a certain point they would mound the mush of skins, stems, and seeds; place a board or thick straw mat on top; and, lifting one foot and then the other onto the board or mat, use their combined body weight to squeeze the mush. The pressers would repeat this sequence three times. Sometimes they would do it again later in the day. Before the juice drained into the tank, it was roughly sieved to remove seeds and other debris.

Collected in the shallow vat, the must commenced fermentation. If the ambient temperature was sufficiently high, within a day the fermentation became tumultuous. This initial phase of the fermentation would usually last up to forty-eight hours, with the crushers wading into the tank to distribute the grape skins evenly across the must, thereby increasing the color and flavor extracted from the skins. When the desired degree of maceration had occurred, the fermenting juice was drained off the sediments. On Etna the fermenting wine was often drained into a second, deeper and larger vat constructed in the ground. Workers next transported the wine by means of clay jars, wooden or animal skin buckets, or other receptacles and poured it into barrels, usually made of chestnut. Where gravity could be used, they simply directed the must or wine into barrels using channels. The barrels where the now gently fermenting wine was transferred were in another room or another building, called a dispensa or cantina. In some places, such as Syracuse, where the palmento was in or next to the vineyard, the dispensa was some distance away, usually in a clutch of farm buildings associated with the owner’s domicile. In such cases the must was put into small barrels, loaded onto wagons, and transported to the dispensa, where it was drained into larger casks. The casks on average had capacities of twenty to thirty hectoliters (528 to 793 gallons), but some held one hundred hectoliters (2,642 gallons) or more. They were rarely cleaned and were prone to leakage. Early barrel-cleaning machines first came into use in Marsala in the mid-nineteenth century. Zucco had two by the 1880s. Leaks were repaired with plaster of Paris or some other filler.

Until the juice finished fermenting, the casks’ bungholes were left open to allow carbon dioxide gas to escape. The completion of alcoholic fermentation, when all or nearly all of the grape sugar had transformed into alcohol, largely depended on ambient conditions. If the temperature remained warm enough, fermentation completed soon, from several to a dozen days after onset. If winter temperatures arrived too soon, it would slow down or stop, likely to restart the following spring when the ambient temperature rose. In practice, when the winemaker noticed that the wine had become clear and bubbles were no longer rising, he hammered a wooden stopper (bung) into the bunghole of the cask. This helped keep fruit flies away, kept objects from falling in, and reduced evaporation. Little was known or understood about malolactic fermentation until well into the twentieth century. This bacterial fermentation turns the sharply sour malic acid into the softer-tasting lactic acid and leaves the wine less vulnerable to deleterious bacterial infections. It is gentle in the sense that it is difficult to notice. The wine becomes cloudy due to the creation of carbon dioxide gas and the disturbance of sediments. When it is limpid again, malolactic fermentation has stopped. Sometimes, however, malolactic fermentation stops without transforming all of the malic acid into lactic acid, leaving stability compromised. At cool locations, such as on Etna, malolactic fermentation likely occurred on its own in the spring, when outside temperatures were high enough to warm the dispensas. In warm places, such as Menfior Pachino, it was likely to commence during the finale of alcoholic fermentation and finish quickly thereafter. When both yeast- and bacteria-induced fermentations had completed, the wine was much less vulnerable to microbiologic degradation and hence more stable for transport and storage. Fortified wines, because of their high levels of alcohol—about 20 percent—were totally microbiologically stable. Probably few other Sicilian wines, however, reached microbiologic stability until the middle of the twentieth century.

Vino da taglio was seldom racked (i.e., drained from cask off sediments into empty barrels) because it was sold just before or at the end of alcoholic fermentation. If the wine remained in the dispensa, it would be racked once after the winter in preparation for sale. During the late nineteenth century, racking occurred more often as the culture of wine improved and more quality vini da pasto began to be produced. Racking is a natural way of stabilizing and clarifying wine, though too much in the presence of air can allow excessive oxidation. Commonly the finer wines were racked four times, the last during the summer after the harvest. There was, however, no topping up of casks to speak of. This would have reduced the oxidation of the wine. Casks were often left half full. Under normal conditions the wine would be sold before the next harvest, in order to use the dispensa space and the casks efficiently. However, the finest Sicilian producers, such as Baucina, d’Orleans, and Hood, matured their wines in cask for up to three and a half, five, and seven years, respectively.

Within the greater wine world, the burning of sulfur in empty casks was widespread. This was conducted during the racking operation, when wine was moved from one container to another. Sulfiting was known to remove bad smells from casks not in use. What was not fully understood in the nineteenth century was that burning sulfur creates sulfur dioxide (SO₂) gas, which has strong antioxidative, antienzymatic, and antibacterial properties. It kills wild vineyard yeast and reduces the activity of ambient cellar yeasts and selected yeasts. Burning sulfur in casks between rackings was standard practice at the best châteaux in Bordeaux in the eighteenth century. While some Sicilian producers making fine vino da pasto burned sulfur in their casks between rackings, most did not. Instead they used a cosmetic alternative called the stufa (“oven”). They boiled fruits and spices such as orange peel, cinnamon, and carob seeds in water and poured the hot liquid into empty barrels. The wood absorbed the water, whose aromas covered the objectionable ones of spoilage yeast and bacteria.

A lack of hygiene was the norm for nineteenth-century Sicilian wine production. Surfaces that came in contact with grape juice or wine were cleaned neither before nor after vinification. There was a belief among Sicilians that the fermentation process had such a forceful cleansing power that it did not need to be protected by sanitation. Tartaric salt accumulations in casks were never scraped away. As a result, palmentos and dispensas became breeding grounds for microbial infections that obscured the true character of wine made in them. This uncleanliness continued in some areas of Sicily well into the twentieth century.

During the vinification process, sediments and whatever skins and stems were left over from the crushing underfoot—whether unfermented, half fermented, or fully fermented—were pressed for their remaining liquid. Nothing went to waste. Even the dry grape skins were soaked in water and refermented to make family table wine. There was an area in the palmento dedicated to this final pressing. These pressings varied in character and quality. Early vinification equipment had copper and bronze parts, which contaminated wine with cupric salts. When exposed to light, these give white wines a reddish brown tint. Such contamination might have played a role in the color common to Sicilian white wines. In the mid-1870s, mechanical steel-and-wood presses, mostly imported from France, began to replace the traditional palmento press (conzo), which employed a massive tree trunk that spanned the length of the palmento and was attached to a huge stone counterweight. Initial pressings were dark and pleasantly astringent but not so bitter. Successive pressings produced successively paler, bitterer, more rudely astringent, and lower-acid juice or wine. This liquid was either added to already fermenting juice or wine or left to continue its fermentation and maturation separately.

Producers added carob juice, cooked must, or cane sugar to the fermenting must if they wanted to increase the sugar content and therefore the potential alcohol content of their wine. Another solution for increasing alcohol strength was simply adding grape spirits. Lemon juice was added to increase acidity. The blood of bulls and other animals was commonly used in fining wine to remove impurities. In the late nineteenth century, producers of fine wines did this with egg whites, which they would whisk into a foam and add to casks. At the Baucina estate the white wines were racked and fined with egg whites eight times before bottling. The blood or egg whites combined with tannins and debris, settled in the lees at the bottom of the cask, and were removed during the racking process. The commercial bottling of fine Sicilian vino da pasto began in the late nineteenth-century. Otherwise, the wine was sold by cask or in bulk.

The type of red wine production in which the stems and skins of the grapes stayed in contact with the fermenting juice was called ribollito in certain parts of Sicily. This skin contact lasted up to a week or more. Domenico Sestini used the word ribollito to indicate such extended macerations.8 Ribollito is the past participle of ribollire, meaning both “to reboil” and “to boil intensely.” On Etna such macerations were not uncommon. The term ritornato, meaning “sent back,” was used in the Caltanissetta area for essentially the same process. In southeast Sicily, a fermentation vat was called a ritorno. Sestini and others noted that ribollito wines resisted degradation. The added tannins from such long macerations would have helped preserve the wine from oxidation. Ideally, the fermentation would have completed without the interruption of a draining off the skins. By contrast, the draining off the skins with twelve-hour, twenty-four-hour, and forty-eight-hour wines would have left them with unfermented sugars, which would have been vulnerable to spoilage yeasts and bacteria. These yeasts and bacteria were plentiful in the unclean dispensas typical of Sicilian wine producers. These wines would certainly have been ruined by the time they reached the cellars of overseas buyers. Jessie White Mario, in her article “Prodotti del Suolo e Viticoltura in Sicilia” (“Products of the Soil and Viticulture in Sicily”), published in 1894, noted a wine jury’s contemporaneous assessment of Sicilian wines that had been imported into the United Kingdom for a wine fair: “As soon as we had begun to taste, we were in agreement that the wines were more or less in a state of fermentation; shortly after we had to remove the wines from the competition because they had no commercial value: some were even so ruined that they were not saleable.”⁹ Sicilian winemakers have suggested to me that ribollire’s literal meaning “to reboil” referred to a fermentation reinitiated after it had stopped. However, the outcome of such a “reboiling” performed in the conditions typical of nineteenth-century Sicilian wineries would have been putrid and undrinkable wines. The vinification method used by the Prince of Butera that Meli described in 1802 resembles ribollito. One wonders how much better nineteenth-century Sicilian wines would have been if producers had read, digested, and acted on Meli’s observations.

LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY FINE WINE PRODUCTION

The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a quality wine industry in Sicily. The principles of modern enology, as practiced in northern Europe, were introduced. A small group of forward-thinking producers began adopting such techniques and entering their wines in international wine fairs. Modern Sicilian enologists know little, if anything, about the history of this early quality wine industry. During that period two of the earliest enological schools in Italy were established in Sicily. The State Technical Agricultural School (La Scuola Enologica) at Catania was created in 1881. Its primary role was as a school of viticulture and enology. Several years after its inception it created a Scuola Enologica, which eventually became the Istituto Tecnico Agrario Statale “F. Eredia,” specializing in viticulture and enology. As of 1885, Marsala had a Regia Scuola Pratica di Agricoltura (“Royal Practical School of Agriculture”), which offered instruction in viticulture and enology. In 1931 it became the Regio Istituto Tecnico Agrario “Abele Damiani.” Starting in 1947, this school has offered a special degree in enology and viticulture. Since the late 1990s it has collaborated with the School of Agriculture (Facoltà di Agraria) of the University of Palermo to offer a specialized university degree in enology and viticulture. There were also three experimental vinification centers, one in Riposto, founded in 1888, one in Noto, founded in 1889, and one in Milazzo, founded in 1903.

A DELAYED EMBRACE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The Sicilian wine industry declined steadily during the 1890s and continued to deteriorate until the end of World War II. Unsurprisingly, this period saw little innovation in Sicilian vinification. But beginning in the 1960s, Ezio Rivella brought modern vinification techniques to Tasca d’Almerita, Settesoli, and Duca di Salaparuta. At about the same time, refrigeration equipment and stainless steel became available to wineries. During the 1970s and 1980s the rapid development of cooperative wineries brought new technologies and equipment to Sicily, principally in the west, where the cooperative movement was stronger and more widespread. The work of the Istituto Regionale della Vite e del Vino (IRVV, “Regional Institute of Vine and Wine”) and its consultant Giacomo Tachis helped to instill a modern European winemaking ethos in Sicily. Before Tachis’s arrival in the early 1990s, concrete and large chestnut casks (botti) had been the only maturation vessels there. His influence brought French barriques into common use for the maturation of red wine. Sicily had been known more for its white wines than its reds. Its reds did not have a reputation for having rich—what Tachis called supple—tannins. According to the quality of the red grape skins and the style of red wine desired, he encouraged producers to adjust the vigor and duration of maceration. For the highest-quality red wines, he sought high dry extract levels. Provided that the tannins in the grape skins were fully developed, these could be achieved with pumpovers and macerations that continued for two weeks or even longer, beyond the end of alcoholic fermentation.

In the early 1990s Carlo Corino, working at Planeta and Settesoli, brought an Australian perspective and Australian techniques to Sicily, and then, in the late 1990s, the Australian Kim Milne, a master of wine and a flying winemaker (via metal, not feathered, wings), consulted for Firriato. In 2000 Calatrasi hired a team of three Australian enologists, Brian Fletcher, Lisa Gilbee, and Linda Domas. Planeta barrel-fermented in new oak barriques a Chardonnay that it released in the mid-1990s. This wine captured the attention of Italian and foreign journalists, who equated its creamy texture and thick, burned-caramel and toasty flavors with top-quality white wine. Firriato’s Nero d’Avola Harmonium, thick, ripe, and oaky, also recalls the style of wine for which Australia was known. The fascination with new-oak-flavored wines spawned a decade of heavy oaking, which sent Sicilian wine away from its roots but toward something else it undeniably needed: international acceptance and acclaim.

MAINLAND ITALIAN CONSULTANTS

The increasing influence of consulting mainland Italian enologists, most of whom also worked in Tuscany, brought Sicily more in touch with modern international vinification and another step away from coming to terms with its roots. Tachis was trained only in enology, though he acquired viticultural knowledge throughout his career. Most consulting enologists today are also trained in viticulture. In Sicily, Carlo Ferrini, Riccardo Cotarella, and Donato Lanati were the principal consulting enologists—three of the most important in Italy—who followed in the wake of Tachis. They brought not only their international reputations, credibility, expertise, and connections to enological suppliers (of machines, tanks, barrels, yeast, additives, packaging, etc.) but also an understanding of how essential viticultural science was for wine production and connections to viticultural suppliers (irrigation installation companies, agrochemical manufacturers, and nurseries).

Sicilians admired Tachis for his understanding of their history and his often-expressed love of the island and its culture. Ferrini, Cotarella, and Lanati have been more difficult for Sicilian enologists to accept as anything but outsiders. Not that these mainland-based enologists do not express a genuine passion for the island and respect for its people. However, none of them show Tachis’s mastery of Sicilian history. Because they have established relationships with viticultural and enological suppliers in northern Italy and France, they direct their Sicilian clients to buy from these and not Sicilian vendors. This offends some Sicilians. What irritates Sicilian enologists most, however, is not the behavior of these foreign enologists but that of the Sicilian wine producers who employ them. Sicilian enologists believe that the producers who forsake them for foreign consultants refuse to acknowledge their hard work and skill. One Sicilian producer who did just that told me that he had upgraded from a Fiat to a Ferrari.

In 2003, Ferrini became the head enologist of Donnafugata following Tachis’s departure, and Cotarella took over at Abbazia Santa Anastasia. Around the same time, Ferrini got the plum job in Sicily: Tasca d’Almerita hired him. Moreover, he followed two Tuscan clients, the owners of Castello di Fonterutoli and of Sette Ponti, to consult for their Sicilian outposts, Zisola in Noto and Maccari in Pachino, respectively. Cotarella was the coach behind Morgante as its wines moved from obscurity into the spotlight. Lanati, however, had been in Sicily earlier than either Ferrini or Cotarella. Salvatore Geraci in 1990 sent a bottle of wine from his vineyard south of the city of Messina to this Piedmont winemaker. Lanati liked it better than the Barolos he was sampling. He suggested that Geraci produce it commercially. Thus the now-famous Palari was born, and Lanati had his first Sicilian client. Emiliano Falsini, a Tuscan enologist associated with the Matura Group, recently replaced Lanati at the Graci Etna estate. The success of Girolamo Russo, Falsini’s most famous client, also on Etna, has attracted attention to Falsini’s work.

HOMEGROWN CONSULTANTS

Salvo Foti stands out, by himself, as Sicily’s greatest homegrown consulting enologist. Curiously, his expertise did not evolve from the goings-on at the IRVV experimental station at Virzi in the 1990s or its spin-offs. In the 1980s, after getting a technical degree in enology, Foti began working with wine producers in various areas of Sicily. In the early 1990s he got his specialist degree in enology at the University of Catania. He has a strong attachment to Etna. As a child he helped his grandfather farm a small vineyard there. Until 2012 his pivotal client at Etna had been Benanti, with whom he had been working since the 1990s. More recent is his association with Gulfi, a winery near Vittoria that excels in single-contrada Pachino wines. Foti manages a group of one to two dozen skilled Etna-based vineyard workers. The group calls itself I Vigneri (“The Winegrowers”) after a trade guild of similarly skilled workers named the Maestranza dei Vigneri (“Winegrowers Guild”) that dates back to 1435. Foti had articles of constitution drawn up for I Vigneri in September 2009. In addition to their duties tending alberello vines, these workers spend the off-season rebuilding the historic lava terraces in Etna’s vineyards. In 2010 they built an enoteca in Randazzo to showcase the wines of the I Vigneri winegrowers and producers. Foti himself owns a small wine estate, also called I Vigneri. Beyond Benanti and Gulfi, his consulting clients tend to be small, even micro-, producers. They also identify themselves under the I Vigneri banner. Foti’s perspective goes beyond the wine business. His mission is to preserve, manifest, and perpetuate the relationship between land, vine, and human. He believes in alberello, dense vine spacing, and the avoidance of systemic sprays and synthetic soil additions. One can always identify a Vigneri vineyard by these characteristics and the chestnut poles that support the vines. Foti’s vinification techniques vary from mainstream ones that assure control through a modest degree of intervention to artisanal, which usually assumes minimal intervention. He has tended to rely on barriques for red wine maturation. Foti has written two books about the wine culture of Etna. More than any other person, he has fostered an awareness of its unique wine culture.

While the force of Foti erupts from the east, the other major Sicilian force, the duo of Vincenzo Bambina and Nicola Centonze, who incorporated their partnership as B&C Enologists, blows across the island from the west. Both went to the Marsala School of Enology and finished their studies in northern Italy, Bambina in Piedmont and Centonze in the Veneto. Their business partnership alone reveals a spirit of association that is new to Sicily. With some clients, they split the work. With others, one or the other takes primary responsibility. As a young enologist Bambina worked under Tachis at Donnafugata. Yet Tachis’s perspectives did not inspire him. Bambina espouses a viticulture and enology of the south. He believes that vines grown in Sicily should not be stressed as is commonly done in traditional European viticulture. Vine care should ensure that a robust, green canopy protects the vine from too much sun exposure and that the vine has enough water to avoid hydric stress. He is not a fan of monster wines or the drastically small yields and late picking that their pursuit encourages. With respect to vinification, he avoids excessive extraction, preferring elegantly styled wines. The wines of two of his clients, Fondo Antico and Brugnano, express this style best. While Bambina energetically states his case, Centonze is self-effacing. He quietly listens to what his clients want and organizes the work to achieve that end, carefully weighing what course is best. The wines of Abraxas from Pantelleria show his meticulous attention to detail.

Another Sicilian enologist’s star has been rising. After fourteen years of being in charge of enology at Tasca d’Almerita, Tonino Guzzo went off on his own. Since then he has dramatically improved the wines of a cooperative, Viticultori Associati Canicattì. His work manifests a flair for the unusual, such as making a passito Perricone at Castellucci Miano and botrytis Grillo at Gorghi Tondi. His greatest triumph is high-altitude Catarratto at Castellucci Miano. Other Sicilian consulting enologists whose work has been impactful are Giovanni Rizzo, Vito Giovinco, Antonino Di Marco, Giuseppe Romano, and Salvatore Martinico.

NO- OR LOW-SULFITE WINEMAKING

There are some off-road vinification trends worth noting, though they are by no means limited to Sicily. One such is no-sulfite winemaking. Because some people are allergic to sulfites and there is consumer resistance to them, there are wine producers who have been trying to refrain from adding sulfites to wine. However, this is a risky practice because sulfites protect wine from oxidation and the activity of microbes that cause wine degradation. Since white wines do not enjoy the antioxidative protection of the tannins of red wine, they are more at risk. Sweet, low-alcohol wines are even more at risk, since sugar is particularly vulnerable to both yeast and bacterial infection. In Sicily the leaders in no-sulfite winemaking have been the Belgian wine merchant Frank Cornelissen and the Etnean Giovanni Raiti. Cornelissen refrains altogether from adding sulfites to his wines. At Giuliemi, Raiti, with the help of the enologist Pietro Di Giovanni, produces Quantico white wine and red wine. Salvo Foti has also been making two low-production (about one thousand bottles) no-added-sulfite wines, Vinudilice, a clairette, or light red wine, and Vinujancu, a white wine.

WILD, AMBIENT, AND SELECTED YEASTS

Sulfite additions are inextricably connected to the subject of vineyard, winery, and selected yeast activity during winemaking. Sulfites subdue and kill vineyard yeast, so-called wild yeast, that arrives at the winery on the skins of freshly harvested grapes. Many producers prefer to eradicate vineyard yeast strains because they cause higher levels of volatile acidity in the wine. Producers who do not add sulfites to their fresh juice let vineyard yeast carry fermentation until ambient yeast strains that inhabit the winery take over and lead fermentation to completion. Such producers say they use natural yeast. The other path is to add sulfites and then selected yeast. Though selected yeasts are “natural,” it is more difficult to argue that they are wild. They come from companies that select, propagate, and sell specific strains. Their use takes wine away from the terroir of both the vineyard and the winery and results in fruitier wines that are usually more appealing to consumers. Their predictable behavior gives winemakers more control over outcomes. Because red wines are less dependent on the fruity smells imparted by yeasts and because consumers tolerate volatile acidity more in red than white wines, the use of vineyard and winery yeast is much more common in red than white wine production. It is rare to find producers of white wines who forgo the use of selected yeast. However, Cornelissen, Foti, Giuliemi, COS, Bonaccorsi, Guccione, Barraco, Porta del Vento, and Marabino all use vineyard and winery yeast in white wine fermentation.

SKIN CONTACT IN WHITE WINE PRODUCTION

If producers macerate white grape skins in warm fermenting juice à la red wine production, they take further risks. White skins contain phenolic compounds that are unstable and oxidize rapidly, thus causing wine to brown. They also contain bitter and astringent substances that add coarse texture to wine. For at least a decade Cornelissen and COS have been fermenting on white grape skins. COS does this in clay jars called amphorae. Cornelissen uses thousand-liter (264-gallon) high-density polyethylene tubs. Some varieties, such as Chardonnay, have the structure, acidity, and alcohol to work better in this kind of fermentation than a variety such as Inzolia, which is lacking in acidity. Chardonnay also benefits from lees contact more than most other varieties. The mannoproteins released by degenerating yeast cells in the lees mute bitterness and astringency released from the skins by the increasing concentration of alcohol. For its Èureka Chardonnay, Marabino has been experimenting with fermenting 60 percent of the Chardonnay on its skins and 40 percent off them. Marco Sferlazzo at Porta del Vento near Palermo ferments Catarratto for two weeks on its skins without temperature control, relying on indigenous yeasts and not adding sulfites. Alice Bonaccorsi, in the town of Randazzo on Etna’s north face, ferments ValCerasa Etna Bianco on its skins, calling the white wine Noir. At Marsala, the Barraco estate makes a Catarratto and a Zibibbo that spend five and thirteen days, respectively, in contact with the skins. At Terzavia, Renato De Bartoli makes Catarratto Lucido wine by fermenting the juice on the skins with temperature control and indigenous yeasts. He also makes a 100 percent Moscato from late-harvested grapes, which he calls Dolcemamà. He ferments this too on its skins but leaves the wine sweet and with 14 percent alcohol. The sweetness covers any bitterness extracted from the skins. Similarly, the production of Passito di Pantelleria includes fermentation in contact with the dried grapes.

AMPHORAE

The off-road hardly ever taken is the use of amphorae for vinification and wine maturation. In the late 1980s, Josko Gravner in northeast Italy, unhappy with the standardization and hyperstabilization of contemporary wines, began researching and experimenting with the ancient Greek and Roman technique of fermenting in terracotta amphorae. One part of the world still fermenting in amphorae is the Republic of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union). Historians believe that this area could have been the origin of Vitis vinifera more than five thousand years ago and that people who live there have been making wine in jars and amphorae ever since. After Georgia broke away from the Soviet Union and had its civil war, Gravner visited to witness how its wine was made. He is one of the leading innovators in Italian wine.

A year after Gravner made his pilgrimage, Cornelissen, fascinated by Gravner’s wine philosophy, also went to Georgia. When he returned, he fermented Etna reds and whites in amphorae. Fifteen of his first seventeen wines turned into vinegar. The problem was that the terra-cotta walls of the amphorae were permeable to oxygen gas, which attacked the wine. Cornelissen’s solution was to coat their insides with epoxy resin, to both limit oxygen transfer and make them easier to clean. Now he matures Magma and MunJebel, two red wines, in four-hundred-liter (106-gallon) resin-coated amphorae that he has buried in the ground inside his cantina. He covers each amphora with a basalt lid. He thinks that porcelain amphorae would be even better than his coated terra-cotta ones, as they would be easier to clean and even less permeable to oxygen. Cornelissen does not seem wed to any formula. He is an intuitive winemaker. Yet he is not against taking cues from modern science.

At the same time that Cornelissen was first adopting the use of amphorae, the COS team of Giambattista Cilia and Giusto Occhipinti was also experimenting with them. They use 225- to 400-liter (59- to 106-gallon) amphorae that they have buried in the ground. Larger than four hundred liters, they say, generates too much heat. After experimenting with Tunisian-, Sicilian-, and Spanish-made amphorae, they have found the Spanish ones most to their liking. Because the amphorae are made of clay, Cilia believes they pick up the flavor of the surrounding soil. Unlike Cornelissen, who ferments in open tubs, Cilia and Occhipinti let both red and white wines ferment in amphorae. They also mature their wines in amphorae, like Cornelissen, but they came up with a different solution to the oxidation problem. They leave the wine on its lees in the amphorae after fermentation. In the lees are live yeasts that scour the wine for oxygen. Their activity balances the passage of oxygen through the amphora walls and into the wine. To solve the problem of oxidation through the lid, they line the top rim with clay caulk and clamp discs of steel onto it. During the March or April following alcoholic fermentation, Cilia and Occhipinti take the wine off the lees but leave it in the amphorae. They bottle during the summer, after the wine has had ten months in the amphorae. COS uses 400°C (752°F) vapor to disinfect them. Ultraviolet light is another option. COS ferments Grecanico, Nero d’Avola, and Frappato in amphorae. It makes both a red and a white Pithos. Pithos is the Greek name for a storage amphora. Cilia says that examples of red Pithos have remained in perfect condition for ten years. He and Occhipinti work in a different way than Cornelissen with amphorae. They take their inspiration more from history, though they, like him, use modern strategies to solve the problems associated with amphorae use.

One other producer in Sicily uses amphorae. At his small farm, Serragghia, on the island of Pantelleria, the winegrower Gabrio Bini uses amphorae to make a dry Zibibbo wine, called Serragghia Bianco. The flavors of the wines of Bini and the other producers who use off-road techniques do not conform to the tastes of consumers and many wine critics. Tasting them challenges us to change how we appreciate wine.

SPARKLING WINE

Sparkling wine production may appear an odd fit for its warm climate, but Sicily has high-elevation sites on Etna, in the center, and along its northern edge. There is even a little-known history of sparkling wine production on the island. From 1881 to 1901 there were notices in several publications of a well-made traditional method (metodo classico) style sparkling wine from a company on Etna owned by Baron Antonio Spitaleri. The varietal base was Pinot Nero. The next notable Sicilian sparkling wine appeared in 1971, when Duca di Salaparuta began producing a Martinotti (Charmat, or tank) method Brut Riserva. A producer of Sicilian “Champagne” contemporaneous with Spitaleri was the winery of Fratelli Favara e Figli at Mazara del Vallo. Less is known of its efforts.

As of 1974, Giuseppe Milazzo in the province of Agrigento was making metodo classico wine. Tasca d’Almerita released its first metodo classico wine in 1990. Since 1991 Murgo has made its metodo classico brut from grapes grown on the slopes of Etna. Today about twenty Sicilian producers are making a total of five hundred thousand bottles of sparkling wine, a small percentage of Italy’s massive three hundred fifty million bottles of such wine. Some of these bottlings amount to as few as two thousand bottles. Others, such as those of Duca di Salaparuta, can amount to two hundred thousand. Sparkling wine is produced through either the Martinotti (or Charmat) method of conducting the second fermentation in tank, followed by filtration with the addition of a dose of sugar and bottling under pressure, or metodo classico, which involves second fermentation in bottle, maturation of the wine for months or years in bottle on the yeast sediment, removal of the yeast sediment, addition of a dose of sugar, and bottling. Sicilian producers use many different grape varieties, both international and native, to make the base wines. Murgo is the market leader of metodo classico wine, with about ninety thousand bottles. Though Sicily is not known for its sparkling wines, its many high-elevation areas allow producers to make them every bit as well as producers at higher latitudes.