that bear the name Marsala must be. As a result, De Bartoli was not allowed to put the appellation Marsala on the label. His wines and boundless enthusiasm and pride found advocates among journalists, though his Marsala was never a market success. Beginning with its first vintage in 1984, De Bartoli's Passito di Pantelleria Bukkuram brought attention to the sweet wines of the island of Pantelleria. He made a style that respected tradition but was less oxidized and fruitier than extant versions. The wine became a sensation. Unlike those of Vecchio Samperi, sales of Bukkuram were brisk. While most Sicilians winemakers in search of quality adopted international, particularly French, vine varieties and techniques and made wines stylistically similar to French ones, De Bartoli celebrated the raw materials of Sicily.
THE DIEGO PLANETA ERA AT THE IRVV
In 1985, Diego Planeta assumed a role that put him at the center of the Sicilian style and quality revolution of the 1990s. He became president of the Istituto Regionale della Vite e del Vino (IRVV, “Regional Institute of Vine and Wine"). The mission of the IRVV, a state-owned company founded in the early 1950s by the region of Sicily, is to help the Sicilian wine industry improve viticulture, wine production, and marketing techniques. The IRVV is charged with conducting research and making it available to all Sicilian grape farmers and wine producers. The timing of Planeta's presidency was crucial. In the early and mid-1980s the Sicilian wine industry was drowning in a sea of low-quality wine without any solution in sight.
The selection of Planeta was revolutionary. Putting an entrepreneur and the president of a winery in this position gave the IRVV the opportunity to move in a dynamic direction. Through his work at Settesoli, Planeta had an intimate understanding of cooperative associations and the political dynamics of the EU, Italian, and regional controls and subsidies. He understood both the bulk and the quality wine markets. The results of the IRVV research were made available to sectors of the Sicilian wine industry.
During the 1960s and 1970s the IRVV put in place the initial scaffolding to support research focused on assessing new technologies, which it made available to vine growers and wine producers. Bruno Pastena, a professor of viticulture at the University of Palermo, in Sicily's west, and Carlo Nicolosi Asmundo, a professor of enology at the University of Catania, in the east, were focal points of this research and its related scientific dialogue. Then, in the 1970s, Nicola Trapani began his long research and teaching career at the Technical Agrarian Institute in Marsala. He, Pastena, and Asmundo became the teachers of the key generation of winegrowers and enologists who would renovate the Sicilian wine industry.
At the beginning of the 1980s, there were stirrings that set the stage for the revolutionary perspectives and great achievements of Planeta's IRVV presidency. In those years, the IRVV agronomist Vincenzo Melia, with the help and guidance of Pastena, set up a program that placed experimental vineyards throughout Sicily starting in 1984. These vineyards tested not only viticultural techniques but also the potential of Sicily's native varieties and those varieties in the process of a rapid international diffusion, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Chardonnay, mostly selected and perfected in France. The early results were so exciting that they gave impetus to larger strides.
The year after Planeta became the president of the IRVV, he set up a collaborative program between it and the Istituto Agrario di San Michele all'Adige (IASMA), Italy's foremost viticultural and enological research institute. Attilio Scienza, a professor at the University of Milan and a leading expert in the selection of clones and vine varieties, was then the IASMA's general director. The University of Palermo and Marsala's Istituto Tecnico Agrario ("Technical Agrarian Institute") were also actively involved in the research. The Menfi area became the focus of their viticultural experimentation, particularly the vineyards owned by members of the Settesoli cooperative. The IRVV and the IASMA studied the performance of fifty varieties, both native and international, which were grafted onto diverse rootstocks and farmed using diverse training systems.
In 1990 the IRVV rented a small space at the Spadafora winery at Virzi for research microvinifications. Soon 250 were under way. Grapes culled from the experimental vineyards were brought to Virzi, where technicians of the IRVV and the IASMA studied their vinification and the resulting wines. According to Scienza, the most interesting varieties from these studies were Fiano, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah. Blends of these wines and native varieties were studied to determine the best partnerships. When the initial results were in, the IRVV invited groups of thirty Sicilian wine producers at a time to taste the experimental wines and to discuss them with IRVV technicians. To fill the first thirty seats, the IRVV sent out 150 invitations. According to Planeta, only about ten producers accepted, and only three attended, representing Tasca d'Almerita, Settesoli, and the new Planeta winery. Soon, however, interest in what the IRVV was doing spread. Wine producers who did not want to be left out of the excitement started their own experimental vineyards, which they linked to the IRVVs work. Sicily's most important winery of the 1980s, Duca di Salaparuta, did not participate. In general, the IRVV was more active in western than eastern Sicily.
Planeta believed that he had to open the eyes of Sicilians to what was going on beyond Sicily. He knew that if quality wine was to be developed, Sicily would have to compete on the world stage. He sent members of an IRVV committee that was composed of mayors, winery owners, heads of cooperatives, and so forth with several IRVV employees to the Trento province of northern Italy to visit the IASMA. Faculty members and researchers exposed them to the latest viticultural and enological technologies. Planeta also organized a group of young Sicilian enologists to be trained as the vanguard for the island's new quality wine industry. He directed them to spend the first year of their program observing the innovation that was taking place all over the world and then in the second year to implement that innovation in Sicily. In the early 1990s the IRVV organized educational excursions for Sicilian enologists to visit the wine industries in France, California, Australia, and South Africa. During the same period, it organized the first Sicilian delegations to Vinexpo in Bordeaux. These initiatives helped to expose Sicilian wine producers to the wine world.
Under Planeta's direction, the IRVV invited the participation of some of the most highly regarded wine experts in Italy. Besides seeking the assistance and advice of Scienza, it engaged Giacomo Tachis, the former chief enologist at Marchesi Antinori and a consulting enologist for many well-known Italian producers. For marketing, Planeta sought the assistance of Giampaolo Fabris, a professor at the University of San Raf-faele and a specialist in the sociology of consumers, best known for his promotional campaigns for Barilla and the creation of its Mulino Bianco brand. Fabris kept the IRVV and the Sicilian wine industry informed of market trends. He also developed mechanisms such as conferences that communicated the improvements in Sicilian wine to the trade and consumers.
THE IMPACT OF GIACOMO TACHIS
Giacomo Tachis, as the most celebrated enologist in Italy, the architect of Tignanello and Sassicaia and other legendary wines, was the idol of young Sicilian enologists, wine professionals, the wine press, and connoisseurs of Italian wine. Though the Marchesi Antinori company had been the principal driving force behind the rise of Tuscan wine during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Tachis was the technical architect of the style of wines for which Marchesi Antinori became known.
Without Tachis, Italy's entry into the post-World War II international wine market would have been delayed. Of Greek ancestry, born and educated in Piedmont, he had a profound respect for French wine. In the early 1950s be began a lifelong correspondence with Emile Peynaud, a professor at the University of Bordeaux and a consultant to some of the most important Bordeaux châteaux. Peynaud, as a teacher and a friend, passed on to Tachis his perspectives and methods. In the 1960s and 1970s, Peynaud was the pivot point for changes in Bordeaux enology. His influence did much to alter Bordeaux's red wine flavor profile. He advocated harvesting at higher than customary levels of ripeness, complete control of malolactic fermentation, maceration customized to grape skin conditions, and maturation that effectively used oxygenation, all of which helped to protect and preserve ripe fruit character of the wine while making its palate supple
