In 1832, Vincenzo Florio became a Marsala producer and merchant. He was born in Calabria in 1799. The Florio family was entrepreneurial and had business interests in the town of Marsala. As a young man, Florio had traveled for six years throughout the Italian mainland, to France, and to Britain, gaining a broad understanding of the world of business. Several years after his return, he set up the Florio Marsala business. Within a few decades, Florio's business activities had vastly expanded in diverse commercial sectors, and he even joined with a business competitor, Benjamin Ingham, to form a shipping company. Meanwhile, to supply the expanding Marsala trade, vineyards had spread beyond Marsala to Mazara del Vallo, Partinico, and Balestrate. By 1854, Florio's annual Marsala production almost equaled that of Woodhouse. Florio became Sicily's model entrepreneur and industrialist. And at the time of his death, in 1868, his Italian assets were worth one-third more than those of Ingham, the most successful of the British merchants in Marsala.
On May 11, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, leading a thousand volunteers called redshirts, embarked from Genoa in two ships and landed in Marsala. His goal was to unite Italy into a single nation. Sicilians, many of them poor peasants from the countryside, flocked to his army to liberate their island from Bourbon rule. After three months of battles, his army controlled Sicily. Garibaldi then pressed on to mainland Italy, but during a return visit to Marsala in 1862, he toured the cellars of Florio. Meanwhile, the British Marsala merchants were finding the newly liberated Sicily less hospitable to their commercial interests. Once liberation was won, many of Garibaldi's Sicilian volunteers, armed and without battles to fight, terrorized the countryside. They became mercenaries for wealthy landowners. It was increasingly difficult to conduct business in a climate where theft was rampant, contracts were not enforced, and protection money was part of the cost of doing business. The new Italian government imposed higher taxes on spirits, an important ingredient in Marsala production. As a result, Marsala producers had to increase their prices, which contributed to a contraction of the market.
As the influence of the British entrepreneurs waned, more Sicilians entered the Marsala trade. In the decade after unification, Sicilians established five new houses—Diego Rallo & Figli, Nicola Spanò & C., Giacomo Mineo & Figli, C. & F. F.lli. Martinez, and D'Alì & Bordonaro. By 1880, in the province of Trapani, the focus of Marsala production, there were about eighteen. By 1895 there were about forty. Many of the Sicilians who entered the Marsala industry were merchants with little or no connection to the world of agriculture, a circumstance that ultimately undermined Marsala's potential as a producer of quality wine in the century to follow. Faced with the challenges of the phylloxera infestation that arrived in 1893, taxation not only on buying spirits but also on making wine, and a worsening market in the United States due to the increasing anti-alcohol sentiment there, many merchants gutted the quality of Marsala at the expense of their industry's long-term health.
THE IMPACT OF PHYLLOXERA
The phylloxera louse had been identified in the south of France as early as 1866. Its spread across France devastated vineyards and left French merchants without enough wine to supply their clients. For the next twenty years, French merchants increasingly came to Sicily looking for inexpensive, deeply colored, alcoholic, tannic cutting wine (vino da taglio), which they could bring back to France, mix with lighter and less-rich northern wines, and then clarify, stabilize, and sell using false indications of origin. Sicilian growers and merchants seized the opportunity to supply the French merchants. During the 1870s the Sicilian cutting wine industry flourished. To satisfy the demand, Sicilian winegrowers planted more vines. In 1874, there were 211,454 hectares (522,514 acres) of vineyards in Sicily. In 1880 that rose to 321,718 hectares (794,982 acres). This was the historic high point for vineyard surface in Sicily. As of 2010, the island had 115,686 hectares (285,866 acres) of vineyards, 36 percent of what was planted in 1880. In 1880 Sicilian wine production reached 8,043,000 hectoliters (212,473,582 gallons).
But the boom went bust. By 1892, Sicilian vineyard acreage and wine production had both sharply decreased, to 213,237 hectares (526,918 acres) and 4,246,000 hectoliters (112,167,453 gallons) respectively. To restore their vineyards, French farmers had been replanting with vines grafted onto American rootstocks. The volume of wine produced by the French harvest had rebounded by 1885. In 1888, the Italo-France Treaty of Commerce of 1881, which had lowered barriers to trade between the two countries, expired. Not only had the French vineyards been restored, but the political relationship between Italy and France had soured, due to Italy's increasingly close ties with Germany, which remained a rival to France after having humiliated it during the Franco-Prussian war. Protectionist measures such as tariffs took the place of the treaty, and French merchants left Sicily—without having made significant contributions to its wine industry, unlike the British. A British consular report of 1888 describes the crisis at the port of Palermo: “There was also a great falling-off in French ships, due to the enormous increase in tonnage dues on French vessels imposed during 1887. Only 13 vessels, of 17,925 tons, arrived, against 108 of 130,773 tons in 1886.”8 The British consular report of 1889 describes the consequences in Sicily: “The failure to renew the treaty of commerce between Italy and France has had most disastrous effects upon the wine trade, and prices have fallen greatly . . . to 50%, nearly.”9
As of 1887, the Catania wine trade, which exported mostly from the port of Riposto, felt the greatest impact from the loss of French trade. In response, Riposto merchants looked for British and U.S. buyers. While the dark, coarse vino da taglio wines might have suited the needs of French merchants, they did not suit British and American merchants, who required finished dry wines with a lower alcohol content. The British vice-consul at the time described the Sicilian export wines as “green,” “shipped . . . in badly coopered casks of chestnut,” and as a result not likely to be sold abroad.10 The British understood that “defective final preparation” was the reason that Sicilian producers were not finding export markets for their red wines, given that “the French for many years have been enabled to introduce them into the world's markets after due manipulation at Cette and Bordeaux.”11
The absence of French traders, however, was not Sicily's only challenge. Phylloxera invaded the island in 1880 at Riesi. By 1885, provinces throughout Sicily were reporting infestations. Given the poor demand for Sicilian wine, it made no sense to replant the devastated vineyards, particularly the ones on slopes that were more difficult and more costly to work. Though the economic forecast for its wine industry was not good, the Italian government supported Sicily's efforts to halt the progress of the infestation and to provide phylloxera-resistant rootstocks developed in Sicily, at first free of charge and later at growers’ cost. Sicily's success in combating its phylloxera infestation was founded on its historic strength: agriculture. By 1889 the British vice-consul was also reporting improvements in Sicilian vinification practices. Some producers were beginning to show “a greater care and cleanliness, and their wine has been of a better quality.”12 Perhaps the loss of the French market had forced some Sicilian producers to improve their wine. At the same time, among a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs and nobility, an interest in making fine wine developed.
PROTO-MODERN QUALITY WINES EMERGE
In the wake of the collapse of the French bulk wine market, a small but significant quality wine industry developed in Sicily during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The British consul William Stigand's report of 1889 to the British Parliament noted, “The most enterprising of Sicilian wine growers having already taken part in the exhibitions of Italian wines at Rome, Bologna, and other Italian towns with considerable success, and also gained distinction by medals and diplomas at the Italian Exhibition in London, at length determined to hold exhibitions of their own.”13 There seemed to be a strong spark in 1889, when the first Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition was held in Palermo and the Circolo Enofilio Siciliano ("Circle of Sicilian Oenophiles") met for the first time, also at Palermo.
Edoardo Alliata, the duke of Salaparuta, had taken over the production of Corvo on the death of his father, Giuseppe, in 1844. Under his direction, Corvo went from the low-volume production of a family estate to a high-volume commercial product. During several visits to France and Tuscany, Alliata realized that he had to modernize the way Corvo was made. He constructed the first wine production facility at Casteldaccia, near the Corvo contrada.