Recently I was, what else, talking wine with a
friend. Sicily came up (we were sipping on a Grillo) and the notion of just how
far Sicilian wines had come, not only in the aspect of quality, but in the
perception of quality. France came up, and how French wines had that particular
je ne sais quoi with regards to how folks saw French wine in the
pantheon of wine greatness. I recalled a story about how, many years ago I was hosting the father
of a client, the father being the director of a very large wine cooperative
near Bordeaux. We were trekking to Northernmost Texas to visit the TV Munson
vineyards. Along the way this gentleman, Raymond Chandou, and I got to talking
about Italy and Sicily, and our mutual affection for the island. “I have many
friends there in and around Palermo,” he recounted. I was a bit puzzled. Why
would the director of a very large wine cooperative have contacts in Sicily? Of
course, over the years, I have learned about the French connection with Sicily
going back centuries. But at the time, I was uninformed. Mr. Chandou was a
direct person. So he cleared things up: “Well, we had a very good business
relationship with the Sicilians.” I took it not to mean that the French were
selling loads of Bergerac wine to Palermitani, but that the Sicilian wine
growers were sending a lot of juice to France. This was before the EU was the
economic and political juggernaut it now
is. “Ah,” I said, “Yes. Selling the sunlight.”
Mr. Chandou winked, a confession, or at the very least, an insinuation
that the Sicilian wine prowess, while not recognized by the greater world, at
that time, was well perceived by their more northerly French winemaking
cousins, and they (the French) were more than happy to help out their more
southerly mates in which to move grapes and wine through the channels.
All this to say, things have changed since those halcyon days.
Now we read that Bordeaux wines are struggling to retain their markets, while
wines from Sicily are having a heyday. And while that characterization might be
infused with a little more enthusiasm than current market and world economic
(and political) conditions attest to, Sicily is having a good moment selling
the sunlight from their own bottles and not as surrogate sunshine for another
country’s wine.
I have a box in my archives closet filled with labels from my
wine trade days. Two reasons: the first being that being a visual person, I
liked to create “label books” of the wines I was selling in which I could show
my clients. Secondly, before Windows 95 and Word, we often had to create wine
lists with said labels, pasting them, one by one onto blank sheets in which to
show the guests who dined at a particular restaurant what wines were available.
It was a painstaking process, so very analog, but it was something that helped
sell the more unfamiliar wines into an Italian, French, American or whatever
style of restaurant we worked with. Suffice to say, that kind of thing went the
way of the dodo bird (thank God!) and the PC revolution changed the way we composed
and created wine lists. But I still have a box of labels with which I sometimes
take a stroll down memory lane with.
And those labels tell a history of the evolution of wine
during the period from, let’s say 1981-1995. Some think it was the beginning of
a Golden Age for wine in America. Folks got into wine drinking not just as a
way to more easily deliver alcohol to the body, thus bestowing a mellow aspect
to one’s self. It was a workaday world, after all — a week of stress and
pressure — and wine was a welcome vehicle for a momentary retreat, an evening
of relaxation and maybe a little bit of euphoria. Yes, I said it. Folks didn’t
just drink wine because of the minerality. The buzz factor figured into it as
well, but I digress.
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| Original photo of mine re-styled by AI |
The French figured out decades ago what the Sicilians have
only recently realized — that the sunlight was worth more with their own name
on the label. Took a while. Lately, Bordeaux is stumbling a bit but Sicily is
having their moment in the sun and reaching straightaway into the hearts of
wine lovers all over the world. There’s a certain justice in that. Selling the
sunlight used to mean selling it to someone else. These days it’s sold direct.
Pass the sunscreen.
P.S. — On a related note, I took a look at Dallas’ new appetite for “coastal Italian” restaurants for D Magazine this month. Some of them are selling the sunlight too — just not the kind you can drink. link here: https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2026/august/authentic-coastal-italian-cuisine-dallas/
wine blog + Italian wine blog + Italy W
