John Woodhouse , the son of a Liverpool shopkeeper, is credited with creating the typical wine that bears the name of the city of Marsala.
It was 1773 when this English merchant, looking for sodium salsula from which to extract soda ash for the production of glass and soap in England, came across a wine in a tavern that reminded him of the Sherry and Madeira popular in the Iberian Peninsula.
The intuition was great: transport Sicilian wine blended with 2 percent alcohol to England via sea transport, which took thirty to forty days.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, many English people moved to Marsala and gave an unprecedented boost to the development of agriculture linked to the area’s wine industry.
In England it acquired such renown that the English government ordered that the Mediterranean fleet, under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson , be supplied with it.
A contract was thus drawn up between Woodhouse and Admiral Nelson for the supply of 500 pipes per year to English ships sailing in the Mediterranean.
At that time, vine cultivation was not widespread in the Marsala area, as olive and sumac cultivation was simpler and more profitable. The peasantry was very poor, and Woodhouse felt the need to transform the countryside’s agricultural economy.
He then began to advance capital to farmers in order to encourage the planting of vineyards, with the condition, however, that they would supply him with grapes and wine at the price he himself would establish at harvest time.
This particular contract between the merchant and the wine producer was called “ Mustu obbligatu ”.
However, John Woodhouse was not the only Englishman to be interested in Sicilian products; in fact, there were many English merchants who traded with Sicily at the beginning of the 19th century.
A prominent place also belongs to Benjamin Ingham , who used his capital to support the development of the wine industry in Marsala.
Ingham deserves credit for having improved the quality of the wine by introducing modern winemaking technology and for having innovated the sales network by relying on qualified sales agents not only in Europe but also in America , thus promoting exports to the United States , Brazil and Oceania .
Over time, the English entrepreneurial model began to attract Marsala landowners and proprietors, who began producing and selling their products. Among these was the Vinci Winery, founded in 1947.
