BARREL AGED SPIRITS COLLECTION

BARREL-AGED SPIRITS COLLECTION

Florio _110 A MYTH TO BE DEBUNKED! Why did John Woodhouse add alcohol to the shipment of Sicilian wines to be used to make Madeira wine ?

FACTORY WINE One thing is certain: after the first success ful shipment of wine, John Woodhouse and his son John Woodhouse Jr. started working on rationalising the fortification process of Marsala by establishing a “Wine Factory” that had stills operating throughout the day, with specialised workers for barrel manu facturing, and a department responsible for clarifying and adding brandy to the wine. In 1804, the economist Paolo Balsamo, who had first-hand information from factory workers, wrote: “I was told that the famous Woodhouse wines contained no less than twenty-five per cent, namely, a quarter, of excellent brandy. In this way, the wine is able to last and with stand navigation while catering to the taste and preferences of those who purchase it.” If this was the case, concludes Rosario Lentini, the addition of brandy was certainly a way to make the wine “seem more appealing to the British who preferred wines with higher al cohol content, rather than having enochem ical purposes”.

The official reason is that adding distillate would have made it possible to better pre serve the wine, preventing any form of sec ondary fermentation and stabilising the product during transhipment. However, if properly made, “robust Sicilian wines” used to have significant alcohol content (even 18%) and, according to Stefano Zirilli (one of the most prominent Sicilian wine producers of the late 1800s), this was more than sufficient to “sail to the ends of the world”. So, did the addition of brandy help to preserve the quality of the product during long voyag es? Or was it simply the producer’s desire to apply the “concia” method to Sicilian wines in order to make them more pleasing to their recipients? This is the theory put forward by Rosario Lentini, an insightful scholar of the history of Marsala. In his latest essay “Sicilie del vino nell’800”, Lentini proves that Wood house was certainly not acting randomly, let alone empirically.

John Woodhouse