Marsala awakes from its slumber

'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts.’

When you visit a distillery or a fortified wine producer as a tourist there can be a disappointing gap between the limitless possibilities of all those maturing casks and the often rather pedestrian samples you’re given after the tour. Such a contrast to the journalist experience where the head distiller or winemaker will show you around, occasionally diving into barrels to give you a taste of something rare and unusual before giving you a slap up a meal. And then there’s the free merch like a cosy Glenmorangie gilet.

I had the former experience when I visited Cantine Florio in Marsala in 2014 to research my book Empire of Booze. The warehouse is stunning (see below). Built in a sort of Moorish meets Italian style, there were so many casks that it had the feel of that warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark. In pride of place is a vast wooden cask the size of a house which was built for the 1915 San Francisco World Fair.

Sadly the wines at the end didn’t live to the architecture. Though the two vergine, unsweetened, were good, Terre Arse (stop sniggering at the back, Jenkins) and the premium Baglio Florio Riserva, the semi-sweet ones were bland and disappointing. I longed for someone to come over with a wine thief and dive into the dark recesses of the warehouse to pull out something old and rare.

Well, clearly someone at Florio had the same idea because in 2023 the company released a range of limited edition wines which not only came from single vintages but also casks from specific locations in the warehouse. I attended a a fascinating and strangely amusing masterclass in London put on by Florio’s director Roberto Magnisi and Italian wine expert Walter Speller put on

I didn’t write it up right away because at first the wines weren’t available in Britain and then they were and I took a look at prices. Not outrageous, starting at about £50 a bottle, but I try not to write about things I wouldn’t personally buy. But whether you are thinking of buying or not, they are wines that reflect the rich history of Marsala - something Tom and I will be covering in a forthcoming episode of ‘Intoxicating History’.

Before we look at the wines, first a little recap. The wines from Marsala in Western Sicily were once spoken of in the same breath as sherry, port and madeira. Indeed Marsala began life as a madeira substitute. In the 1780s a Livepudlian merchant called John Woodhouse visited the island, tasted the wines and noted a certain similarity to madeira which was all the rage at the time. He fortified and sweetened the wines for British tastes and began exporting them. A stroke of marketing luck happened when Nelson visited from Naples where he had been canoodling with Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British consul. He tried Woodhouse’s wares and declared “the wine is so good that any gentleman’s table might receive it, and it will be of real use for our seaman.”¹

Other British merchants arrived on the island like Benjamin Ingham from Yorkshire. There was fabulous money to be made. These merchants married into local families and formed an Anglo-Sicilian merchant aristocracy. The Whitakers, relatives of Ingham, built the Villa Malfitano Whitaker in Palermo whose fabulous trompe l'oeil interior looks like something from the latest series of The White Lotus.

Not all the merchants were British. The Florio family came over from Calabria in 1833. The name will be familiar to fans of motor racing as it was a scion of the family, Vincenzo Florio, who started the Targa Florio motor race that ran in the hills near Palermo. If you want to see motor racing at its most unsanitised watch videos of the 70s races which feature circuit racing Alfa Romeos and Porsches flat out with little Sicilian towns while old men in flat caps and braces look on in delight.

The firm is no longer in family hands but its magnificent cantine (wine cellars) at Marsala is still there as a reminder of past glories. Sadly most of the legacy from the golden era is not in such good nick. All over Western Sicily you’ll see ruins which look like little slices of Regency Bath or Cheltenham. These were wineries where the grapes would be processed. This picturesque decrepitude reaches its apogee with the harbour front at the town of Marsala itself.

If you want an idea of how big the trade in Marsala’s wine used to be, visit the town’s port and you’ll see two huge abandoned stone warehouses which belonged to the firms of Woodhouse and Ingham/ Whitaker. A symbol of commercial decline every bit as poignant as say the disused Packard factory in Detroit.

The Whitaker and Woodhouse families sold up to Cinzano in 1929 and Marsala, once enjoyed by connoisseurs like Thomas Jefferson, became an industrial wine that today is mainly used for cooking. Marsala never really recovered from phylloxera, the vine eating pest which arrived in Sicily in 1893. The vineyards were planted with lesser grape varieties and producers went for quantity rather than quality.

And yet good wines, particularly the unsweetened vergine wines from producers like Florio, Pellegrino, and Curatolo are still made. The true keeper of the marsala flame though is Marco de Bartoli. It is now the only producer making marsala in the traditional manner: hand-harvested grapes from their own estate, solera ageing and no sweetening cooked grape must. The late Marco de Bartoli had a grudge against the British for ruining his native wine by fortifying it.

After years of slumber (the quote in the subtitle is from The Leopard) it seems like the rest of the industry is finally waking up.