period between the two World Wars. After 1950, vineyard acreage declined slightly until expansion began again in 1957. This decline was due to the extirpation or abandonment of old, diseased, and difficult-to-work vineyards and to the dwindling agricultural labor force. Vineyard acreage reached its postwar high in 1959, when 236,000 hectares (583,169 acres) produced 6,270,000 hectoliters (165,635,877 gallons) of wine.
Until the 1960s, the principal wine production of Sicily was dedicated to either high-alcohol white wines for Marsala production or high-alcohol red wines for export. These concentrated wines could only be produced with low yields and alberello (literally “little tree") training, a labor-intensive method of inducing low-lying vines to produce a small crop per plant. Before the 1960s, yields were low, on average less than fifty quintals per hectare (4,461 pounds per acre). In western Sicily most of the wine produced was white; in eastern Sicily, red. Much of the high-alcohol red wine was bulk wine that was shipped to northern and central Italy, where it was blended into local wine that needed color or alcohol.
During the late 1950s, French merchants purchased large volumes of cheap wine from other sources, notably Tunisia and Algeria, which were both still colonies of France. French wine technology, the most advanced in the world, helped develop their wine industries. Tunisia's independence in 1956 resulted in the deterioration of its wine industry. Its role as a supplier of bulk wine to France diminished. After Algeria's independence in 1962, its bulk wine exports to France also dwindled. Still, treaty obligations forced France to buy seven million hectoliters (184,920,437 gallons) of Algerian wine until 1970.
In 1968 the EU for the first time removed internal customs duties. This allowed for a free flow of products across member borders. Uniform customs duties on imports from nonmember states protected EU members equally. These policies made the EU a trading bloc. In the following year the EU began to standardize wine regulations. It approved member state laws that regulated the quality but not the quantity of wine produced. Yield regulations—part of the geographically based certifications appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) in France and denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) in Italy—associated with the quality wine categories made it highly unlikely that the quantity of quality wine would become a problem. France, however, expressed concern about the quantity of largely unregulated bulk wine, principally what was produced in Italy. Italian wine producers wanted to exploit two EU member markets, France and West Germany. Italian politicians successfully stifled the passage of EU regulations that would have limited Italian wine production. The most the EU could do was set up a system to monitor the quantities of wine produced by member states. Concern over oversupply remained. EU members discussed emergency policies such as the storage or distillation of surplus bulk wine as a means of controlling supply and demand, which would assure a bulk wine price that would protect the livelihoods of EU grape farmers and wine producers.
Domestic consumption trends within France and Italy aggravated the balance of wine trade between the two. Annual domestic wine consumption in France had registered an overall downward trend since at least 1960. In Italy, annual domestic consumption rose until 1969, when it began a downward trend that culminated in a steep decline from 1974 to 1978. These downward trends continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century. They set the stage for an enormous overproduction of wine after 1970 in Italy, particularly Sicily. Not only were the prices of Italian bulk wines generally lower than those of French bulk wines, but the Italian wine industry grew in leaps and bounds because it believed that there was unlimited potential in both overseas and domestic markets. The diminishing supply of Algerian and Tunisian bulk wine and the EU agreements that opened up trade among EU members induced French wine merchants to look for cheaper bulk wine than could be purchased in France. They found it in Sicily and Apulia.
A series of large harvests in the early 1970s in France and Italy began to create an oversupply of bulk wine in the EU market. French bulk wine producers, largely from the Languedoc area on the Mediterranean coast, had a difficult time selling their wine. They became infuriated when they saw Italian wine, purchased by French merchants, arriving in their country. In 1974, French wine producers began a series of provocative actions aimed at calling national attention to their problem.2 They blocked the unloading of tanker ships at the Mediterranean port of Sète (named Cette until 1928), where most of the Sicilian bulk wine arrived. The “War of Sète” that these incidents kicked off lasted until 1980. Such demonstrations stirred the sympathy of French citizens. French politicians, under pressure to act, imposed import taxes on Italian wine. These taxes, however, violated the EU agreements guaranteeing free trade among member states. In 1976 the taxes were rescinded. By the end of the decade, of a total Sicilian production of about ten million hectoliters (264,172,052 gallons), five million (132,086,026) were exported. Eighty percent of Sicily's wine exports went to France, a pattern that resembled the one of one hundred years before; the remaining portion went mainly to Russia.
After Sicily reached its postwar vineyard acreage high in 1959, the modernization of viticulture began to have a profound influence on its wine industry. By 1984, vineyard acreage had dipped significantly, to 186,300 hectares (460,357 acres), about 80 percent of the 1959 figure. However, during the same period wine production rose from 6,270,000 hectoliters (165,635,877 gallons) in 1959 to its postwar high of 10,893,000 hectoliters (287,762,617 gallons) in 1984, an increase of almost 75 percent. Increases in grape yields per acre caused this remarkable about-face. The combined effects of higher yields per vine—due to modern agribusiness practices and technologies (irrigation, increased use of fertilizers, higher-yielding training systems, higher-yielding cultivars, and increased mechanization), in many cases advocated and financially supported by the EU—and diminishing per capita wine consumption in the wine-producing countries of Europe were creating a runaway crisis of overproduction. Yields increased twofold during the 1960s, from about thirty-four to seventy quintals per hectare (18,522 to 38,134 pounds per acre). From 1970 to 1979, yields almost doubled again, from 65 to 107 (the historic high point) quintals per hectare (35,410 to 58,291 pounds per acre). At EU meetings, the French government continued to lobby for controls on the quantity of wine produced by member states.
The three principal methods that EU bureaucrats devised to limit wine production were vine-pull schemes, bans on vineyard expansion, and forced distillation of excess wine. Vine-pull schemes, which paid farmers for each hectare of vines they uprooted, were one of the first solutions suggested for taking vineyards out of production. As early as 1953, the French government had considered its own vine-pull scheme. In 1976 the EU authorized payments to growers to permanently uproot vineyards. It also capped vineyard expansion. Unfortunately, the rapid growth in yields more than offset the reduction of acreage under vine.
Distillation was a more complicated solution. It was considered a solution of last resort because its effects were short term and because it occurred at the end of the production process, not the beginning. Subsidizing the distillation of such excess wine essentially meant that EU monies would pay for not only the growing of grapes, with all its costs, but also the making, storage, and distillation of the wine, plus various transport costs. Though EU countries as of 1969 had agreed that forced distillation could be used to deplete stocks of unsalable bulk table wine, it was only in 1979 that guidelines for the practice were first discussed. Bounteous harvests in 1979 and 1980 further aggravated overproduction problems in both France and Italy. The distillation solution was complex, and discussions continued until 1982, when the EU approved policies of voluntary and forced distillation. It set different percentages of “guide prices” for bulk table wine depending on whether wine producers distilled it of their own accord or under EU coercion. The EU used the following scheme (much simplified here, of course): The producers involved arranged to have their excess wine distilled at a distillery. The distiller paid the guide price to the wine producer. The EU then bought the distilled wine from the distiller. The EU paid for storage of the ethyl alcohol produced by distillation until it could be sold on the bulk industrial alcohol market. Guide prices for each season were based on the market prices for the previous one. It was a byzantine scheme.
The reforms of 1982 proved insufficient to control overproduction, however. EU bureaucrats had not foreseen that they would inadvertently give birth to an industry dedicated to making
