Marsala is an Englishman's improvisation. Storm-bound in the Sicilian port in 1773, the merchant John Woodhouse fortified the local perpetuum wine to survive the voyage home, found England approved, and founded an industry; Nelson's Mediterranean fleet provisioned here, and English houses raised warehouses along the shore. In 1860 Garibaldi and his Thousand landed at Marsala, and the sweet style still bears his name.
The wine beneath the story is serious: Grillo above all, aged in a solera-like perpetuum to walnut-amber depths. A century of shortcuts reduced Marsala to a cooking ingredient, the bottle beside the stove; the recovery runs through its driest, unfortified-in-spirit summit, the long-aged vergine, where the old dignity survives intact.