Striglia, who was originally from Piedmont. About five miles southwest of Zucco, at the village of Tornamira near the large town of Partinico, Striglia set up an estate of seventy hectares (173 acres). His vineyard, planted in the mid-1870s, was at six hundred meters (1,969 feet) above sea level on a slope facing northwest. Stigand describes red Tornamira as similar to a “clean, full-bodied Burgundy.”18
Near Zucco and Tornamira is an ancient Moorish castle, Castel Calattubo. It is deserted, sits atop a cliff, and is visible from highway A29, which connects Palermo to Marsala. Principe don Pietro Papé di Valdina named his wine after this castle. His vineyards of some thirty hectares (seventy-four acres) were on slopes overlooking the Bay of Castellammare. The white Castel Calattubo contained 14 to 15 percent alcohol. Stigand described it as “one of the finest of Sicilian white wines,” even more delicate than Corvo white.19 It was made from Catarratto and kept two years in barrel and one in bottle. It won gold medals at several international exhibitions, including the one that the Palermo Chamber of Commerce awarded at that city's first Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition. In 1898 Castel Calattubo was served at a court reception in Rome for King Umberto I of Italy, along with a Gattinara from Piedmont and Champagne.
Near Mezzojuso about twenty miles southwest of Palermo, at an altitude of 550 meters (1,804 feet), Marchese Policastello made both red and white wines called Castel di Mezzoiuso. At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, one of these won a silver medal. Stigand describes the white Mezzoiuso as “something similar in flavour to a Chablis, with a slight dash of Sauterne; the red wine could not be distinguished from a good Bordeaux.”20
The British consular reports of this epoch catalog several more noteworthy Sicilian wine producers. Cavaliere Salvatore Salvia at Casteldaccia made a white wine called Vino Navurra from Inzolia and a red wine from the Perricone variety. He exported his wines to France, Germany, and the north of Italy. Pietro Mirto Seggio of Monreale made a wine named Renda after its contrada of origin. He fitted out his cellar with three state-of-the-art Mabille presses from France. In 1889 the Italian government awarded several enologists in the province of Palermo for the modernity and cleanliness of their wine-making facilities. Seggio and his technician, Signore Saluto, both won silver medals. Edoardo Alliata's winery and Giovanni Lagarde both won bronze.
At Mazara del Vallo, south of Marsala, Vito Favara Verderame, a British vice-consul, established a large winery, Fratelli Favara e Figli, which made a wine called Irene. Stigand reported that it tasted much like white Zucco.21 Fratelli Favara also made Sicilian “Champagne.” At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, the company won honorary medals for Irene and its “Champagne.”22
For the Etna area circa 1889, the British vice-consul Robert O. Franck singled out Baron Antonio Spitaleri as the most important winegrower. He had facilities and 150 hectares (371 acres) of vineyards between Adrano and Biancavilla on the southwest slopes. With grapes coming from elevations of between eight and twelve hundred meters (2,625 and 3,937 feet), he made a range of wines, including a Pinot Nero-based Sicilian “Champagne,” a Sicilian “Cognac,” and an Etna Rosso. He exported to both America and India. In 1888 he made seven thousand export shipments of his wine, some in cask and some by the case.23 At the Grand Sicilian Fair and Enological Exposition at Palermo in 1889, Spitaleri won silver medals for his Etna Rosso and his “Champagne.”
On the western flank of Etna, Alexander Nelson Hood, a distant heir of Admiral Horatio Nelson, made great investments in wine production at a farm in the Gurrida contrada near his family estate, Castello Maniace. Ferdinand III, the Bourbon king of Naples, had granted the castle and its grounds (along with the title “the first Duke of Bronte") to Admiral Nelson in 1799 for his service protecting Sicily against the advances of Napoleon. Hood inherited the estate in 1868. During the 1870s, he tested the suitability of various foreign varieties to the soil and climate of his ninety-seven hectares (240 acres) of vineyards. He brought vines from the island of Madeira, from Bordeaux and Roussillon in France, and from Spain, particularly the area of Granada.24 He finally settled on Grenache Noir. He had the assistance of two French technicians. Before vinification, the grapes were destemmed and damaged berries culled. The “winepressers” wore moccasins of gutta percha, a natural latex with properties similar to those of rubber, while they gently trod the grapes. Asepsis was maintained. The wine then matured in cask for seven years. Hood's winery had a capacity of 180,000 bottles, similar to that of a Bordeaux château. Stigand describes Hood's white wine as “of a light, amber colour, dry, of pleasant bouquet, of a good aroma, with full natural body . . . , esteemed beneficial for invalids; lighter than Marsala, with something of a flavour between Madeira and Sauterne. It has a clear, primesautier [lively] taste, and it is said to keep any length of time and improve in bottle.”25 Hood also made a red wine, labeled Claret, the name the English gave to the red wines of Bordeaux.26
The Mannino dei Plachi family of Catania also produced Etna wines, which they sent to the World's Fair at Vienna in 1873, an exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the 1880 International Competition in Melbourne, and the World's Fair at Paris in 1900. One of the other early foreign wine producers in Sicily, Moritz Lamberger, a.k.a. the Flying Dutchman, set up a winery on Etna in 1900. Capitalizing on the phylloxera infestation of the vineyards in Austria-Hungary, he helped to open up this market for Sicilian wine. In the early twentieth century, the two most famous Etna producers were Carlo Tuccari of Castiglione di Sicilia, who made a wine named Solicchiata after a nearby village, and Biondi & Lanzafame of Trecastagni, which in 1913 and 1914 won top awards in several national exhibitions at Paris and Lyons in France.
At the Italian Exhibition in London in 1888, the fine wines of Sicily were as well represented as those of any other region of Italy. More sophisticated perspectives, both from abroad and in Sicily, had stimulated the growth of an indigenous quality wine industry that was connected to and even recognized by the world. On Edoardo Alliata's death, in 1898, his nineteen-year-old grandson Enrico took over the management of the Corvo estate. Just two years earlier he had worked as an errand boy and cellar hand at a Sauternes wine estate in Bordeaux. Applying techniques that he had learned there, he created Corvo's Prima Goccia ("First Drop,” or, in the language of winemaking, “Free Run"), a wine even more delicate than the regular Corvo. It won the Grand Prix Bassermann at Rome in 1903. But two years later the Palermo Chamber of Commerce severely criticized the wine, judging its delicacy and low alcohol to be evidence of weakness. This disparaging assessment signaled the beginning of the end for Sicily's unusual period of quality wine production. The traditional Sicilian standard that white wines be amber-tinted, alcoholic, slightly sweet and viscous, and with little aroma was reasserting itself. Despite this critical chastisement, the Corvo of Duca di Salaparuta lasted beyond World War I. All the other fine wine producers of the late nineteenth century disappeared. What a tragedy for Sicilian wine!
More tragic for Sicily in this period was the plight of its peasant farmers and small winegrowers, who suffered the impact of the phylloxera infestation and the lingering stranglehold of feudalistic agrarian contracts and taxes. At the beginning of 1894 the government of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi (a Sicilian by birth and a liberal in name) summarily crushed the fast-growing social and political movement that had banded urban artisans, sulfur mine workers, and rural peasants together under the banner Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori ("Sicilian Workers’ League") to protest and strike against the island's abusive land, labor, and tax practices. In the wake of the Fasci suppression, Crispi unexpectedly introduced legislation in July 1894 that proposed fundamental agrarian and tax reform. After his government fell in 1896, the new government of Prime Minister Antonio di Rudinì (a Sicilian aristocrat and wealthy landowner who beginning in 1897 personally oversaw the construction and operation of his own massive, state-of-the-art winemaking facility in Pachino in the southeastern corner of Sicily) wrestled with the aftermath of the Fasci repression and these questions of reform.
In a two-part article in the scientific and literary journal Nuova Antologia ("New Anthology"), the British-born journalist
