Perfect!”
“An old man owns this vineyard. After years of my asking him if I could buy his fruit, he has finally said yes. One day I hope to buy this vineyard from him. I can’t tell him that, because if he knows I want it, he will raise his price.” We zigzagged through the alberelli, making our way back to the car. A sign indicated that an adjacent vineyard was for sale. Giacomo took out his cell phone and dialed the seller’s telephone number. He turned his back and lowered his head, spoke into the phone, then snapped it shut. “I left the owner a message telling him that I was inquiring about the vineyard for sale. I can bargain better because I want it less. He will sense this, so he will sell it to me cheap. Once I buy it, I will, by Italian law, have the option to buy the one I really want as soon as it comes up for sale. In Sicily you must be patient and work in ways that are not obvious.” We got back in the car and made our way east, inland.
When John Woodhouse first arrived in Marsala, in 1770, he sampled a local wine referred to as vino perpetuo. A wine connoisseur, he noted its similarities to Madeira, a fortified wine prized by the English market. He realized that he could fortify the local wine and make a wine similar to vino perpetuo. He could then sell this in the British market at a competitive price. The Marsala wine industry was born.
“Old maps show that along the coast here north of the port of Marsala was where the vineyards were when Woodhouse first arrived in Marsala,” Giacomo told us. As we drove inland, the land gradually rose. Pitted white-gray stones appeared more frequently. About a mile inland, the incline increased. Giacomo pointed out that we were moving from the littoral plain, where the soil was black and rich, up and over a limestone plateau. Vineyard expansion occurred here during the early nineteenth century. I could see that the soil varied from deep red to light brown. Giacomo told us that the red was from iron leached from the limestone by thousands of years of rain. (The rains come during the winter.) We drove along this plateau, which gave us a panorama of the sea. The vegetation was scrawny. Vineyards alternated with spaces littered with chalky rocks of all shapes and sizes. At some points in the journey, it looked like we were on the surface of the moon.
Our guide spoke as he drove: “Woodhouse’s success attracted others, first fellow Englishmen in the early 1800s, then, by the mid-1800s, Sicilians.” We stopped in front of a stone archway rising up among rocks and weeds. Behind the archway were the ruins of a large stone house. Where the roof should have been there was blue sky. We stood on a rock wall to get a better view. Through one window we could look through another to the shimmering Mediterranean. The smell of burned vegetation filled the air. Farmers were burning brush. The weeds in front of the wall grasped clear plastic bottles and white plastic shopping bags. A mangy dog sauntered like a ghost through the ruins.
“This is one of Woodhouse’s baglios,” Giacomo announced as we peered in. “Marsala families built these stone houses. Woodhouse and the other large producers set up many baglios in the vicinity of their grape sources, as well as one large one at the port of Marsala. This one is in contrada Mafi. Look how this baglio commands a view of the plain below and the Mediterranean Sea. Most baglios were strategically positioned. Sicily has always been invaded from the sea. Baglios were sentinels as well as places to live and work.” Later we found out that as many as twenty-seven people owned a part of this ruin. One might own half a wall, half a stairway, half an arch. In order for this baglio to be restored, all twenty-seven would have to agree to sell. Everyone waits for others to sell first. They believe that they can get a higher price as the buyer becomes more desperate to own the final plots. So nothing happens. Not having this historic property and others like it sensitively restored cuts the nose off Sicily, disfiguring its face. Giacomo, however, feels the magic and the potential of this baglio. “I would love to buy this place. I would love to bring it back to life.”
We went back to the car and drove to the northern edge of the limestone plateau, which looks over a vast plain carpeted with patches of vineyards. In the distance loomed Erice, a well-preserved medieval town atop a mountain. Erice Mountain rose like a huge sperm whale out of a green sea. We could see the profiles of the buildings of the town bristling like tiny teeth on the summit. On many days, when the sun pours down on Trapani, Erice’s closest port, just to its east, the town of Erice is veiled in clouds. The province of Trapani has more acres planted to vines than any other province in Italy. It accounts for more than 55 percent of the vineyards planted in Sicily. Just visible to the east were the hills of Salemi, where the higher altitudes and distance from the sea make lower-alcohol wines with less tactile structure. The grapes grown in Salemi are better suited for modern white wine sold by the bottle than for base wines for Marsala. South of Marsala is Mazara del Vallo, where growing conditions are similar to those near Marsala.
Giacomo pointed out, though, that the soil of the plains between us and Erice consisted of heavy clay, better suited to growing cereal than vines. Innumerable local families owned tiny plots. Most owners had other jobs that supported them. They farmed these vineyards to supplement their incomes and to retain their families’ historic connection to agriculture.
Giacomo showed us a vineyard his family owns. As a child, he loved working with his father in the family vineyards. This particular plot had an added attraction. A shepherd had bivouacked his sheep within the walls of an eviscerated nineteenth-century baglio just down the road. Every morning he made fresh ricotta. The warm ricotta was young Giacomo’s early morning treat.
He walked over to the ruins of that baglio. Another shepherd now presided. Giacomo went up and joked with him in the local Sicilian dialect. He wanted to assure the man that we were not there to make his life difficult. The shepherd was a squatter. We walked past a shed surrounded by a litter of cats and several scruffy dogs. Opposite the shed, an imposing stone arch allowed entry into the courtyard. As was the case with Woodhouse’s baglio, there was no sign of a roof. Stones had been pulled from the walls to barricade windows and doorways so as to confine the sheep to the courtyard. Clumps of wool stuck in crevices. An overturned cast-iron bathtub had been their feeding trough. We walked up to a stone well in the center of the courtyard. An apron of rounded stones spread out and was then buried in the sea of black sheep feces that covered the courtyard. I tried to imagine the smell of the fresh, warm ricotta that young Giacomo had savored decades earlier.
“This is a baglio, Baglio Musciuleo, once owned by Ingham,” he said. Benjamin Ingham founded his Marsala company in 1812. While Woodhouse modified the local wines, Ingham improved the base wines by systematizing viticulture. In time, his company became larger than that of Woodhouse. A handful of English entrepreneurs, most notably John Hopps and Joseph Gill, also came to Marsala to produce their own Marsala wine. It is ironic but telling that Sicily’s most famous historic wine was the invention of foreigners. It is also telling that the first Sicilian producer of Marsala, Vincenzo Florio, was not originally from Sicily but Calabria. For Giacomo, as for Sicily, the age of Woodhouse, Ingham, and Florio was pivotal.
Giacomo’s final stop was Baglio Donna Franca. Across the street from Baglio Woodhouse, the Florios had built this much larger baglio. Phalanxes of vines on our right loaded with purple Nero d’Avola grapes marched across brownish white soil. On our left, behind a low rock wall, vines carrying golden-yellow bunches of Grillo paraded across brilliant red soil. In front of us the large dimensions of Baglio Donna Franca signaled the heyday of the Marsala wine industry. The massive high white wall was almost blinding in the sun. Midway along its breadth was an arched entry to a central courtyard. Giacomo looked up and pointed at a squat structure above and to the side of the archway. “That is an old Saracen tower. It dates back to the eleventh century. From that high point the Saracens looked out across the sea, searching for the ships of their enemies.”
Giacomo sighed, his mind revisiting the moment a decade ago when he had strolled through the ruins of what came to be called Sceccu d’Oru (“The Golden Ass”) after World War I. During the war, the Florio family had set up a clandestine distillation operation in the baglio. This was to avoid the taxes the government set on spirits that Marsala producers had to buy to fortify their wines.
