Marsala

Marsala's fame came about quite by accident, when in 1773 the English merchant John Woodhouse, en route to buy a cargo of soda at a port farther south, was forced by a tempest to seek shelter in the port of Marsala. It was a sleepy town then, too, much declined from the commercial prominence it had enjoyed in Roman and in Renaissance times. But the local inn served good wine, the strong, aromatic vino perpetuo, aged for years in the same cask, a portion siphoned off each fall and bottled, and the cask topped off with new must. A few glasses convinced Woodhouse that he had found something as good as the Madeira then in vogue in England, and instead of buying soda he shipped off 5,000 imperial gallons of wine, fortified with distilled alcohol so as to resist the sea journey and shipped in "pipes," the 100-gallon barrels that are still today the standard measure at Marsala. And then he awaited his partners' reaction.
The answer, when it arrived, was enthusiastic. Woodhouse bought up an old tunnery on the outskirts of town and transformed it into a winery, the Baglio Woodhouse. He persuaded the local farmers to extend their vineyards by lending them capital in exchange for a monopoly on the harvest. By the end of the century he had built up a flourishing trade, and had signed a convention with Admiral Nelson for furnishing wine to the British Navy.
Woodhouse's success attracted competition. Benjamin Ingham, another English merchant already involved in Sicilian trade, came down from Palermo in 1806 to have a look, and six years later he started building his own baglio just down the road. It was Benjamin Ingham who first established a series of rules and standards for the production of Marsala, and he and his nephew Joseph Whitaker established what was to become the town's leading firm.
Still another competitor arrived in the 1830's: Vincent Florio, the founder of Palermo's greatest industrial dynasty, bought up the buffer zone of empty land between the two English rivals and thereupon built his own enormous establishment.
At first there was room for all three of them, and for numerous local wine producers as well, such as the Pellegrinos, the Rallos and the Mirabellas. The trade in Marsala wine prospered, peaking around 1870 at an annual production of some 50,000 gallons. Tastes and fashions changed however, and then at the beginning of the new century the phylloxera disease decimated Europe's vineyards and greatly recuced the production of Marsala. Unscrupulous imitators and the attempt to cash in on new mass markets did a similar job on the wine's reputation. The name became synonymous with gooey egg creams and banana- or strawberry-flavored concoctions. So little true Marsala was marketed that in 1927 the Ingham, the Woodhouse and the Florio concerns were forced to sell out to the northern Italian firm of Cinzano, which still produces all three labels under the Florio name.
In recent years a serious effort has been made to re-establish Marsala's reputation. In 1964 it was the first Italian wine to win Denominazione d'Origine Controllata standing, and in 1984 the Sicilian Government passed severe and complicated laws regulating its production. Today the term Marsala can be applied only to wine produced from certain kinds of grapes (the principal varieties are catarratto, grillo and inzolia) grown and bottled within a certain area of the province of Trapani. The many types of Marsala fall into three main categories, the differences reflecting the different traditions of aging and fortifying that have been in use for centuries.
The fine and the superiore are the sweeter of the Marsalas, the natural sugar content of the grapes being increased by the addition of mosto cotto, a syrup of boiled-down grape must that has been used as a sweetener in Sicily since classical times. Another traditional fortifier is sifone, or mistella, a mixture of must from almost over-ripe grapes and distilled wine alcohol that has been aged and agitated in a cask for several months. Marsala fine, aged in wood for a minimum of one year, is used mainly as a cooking wine; Marsala superiore can be a sticky two-year-old dessert wine, or a full-bodied and silky semisweet vino da meditazione that has blended with reserves dating back to the last century.
The queen of the Marsalas is the vergine or soleras, aged in wood for at least 5 years, or, in the case of the stravecchio or the riserva, 10 years. Marsala vergine has been fortified by alcohol to bring it up to the required 18 percent, but contains neither mosto cotto nor sifone: it owes its character to the soleras method of aging in horizontal rows of casks, in which a portion of the contents of each row is pumped down to the one beneath, in order to make room at the top each year for the new wine. This method, imported from Spain by Woodhouse and Ingham, is only a variation on how the Sicilians have always made the vino perpetuo such as Joseph Woodhouse first tasted in 1773.
Served chilled as an aperitif, or as an accompaniment to cheese, Marsala vergine is a surprising and gratifying discovery. But penalized by the bad reputation that Marsala wines as a whole have acquired in recent decades, few of the great Marsalas attract the attention of importers, who continue to look upon Marsala as a cheap cooking wine. Even in mainland Italy only the most discriminating restaurants and liquor stores offer top quality vergine or riserva Marsalas. The best and sometimes the only way to discover them is to visit the wineries where they are born.
Perhaps the most rewarding to visit is the Florio, since it still occupies the original Baglio Floria. The offices are housed in the family's Art Nouveau villa, whic is surrounded by the old warehouses. One warehouse contains a double aisle of casks stretching nearly 500 feet. Also on the ground is a museum with mementos of Garibaldi's visit and an interesting collection of old bottles, including one of Florio's Marsala Tonic, sold in pharmacies in the United States during Prohibition; the label, with Hospital Size printed in red, prescribes "A small glassful twice a day.