Selling the Sunlight

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 dines 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.

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/

 

© written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

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