The Delicata story
Last year, the Delicata family celebrated their 100th anniversary in the wine-making business. They have spent the last few years investing for the next hundred.
The Delicata family’s involvement in the wine business began when George’s grandfather Edouardo Delicata began making wine and selling it from premises in Santa Venera, in the first few years of the 20th century. In those days, wine was not sold in bottles but in kegs, to wine-shops. These ħwienet tal-inbid sold wine by the glass or pitcher, direct from the keg. Customers drank in the shop or stopped by to fill a pitcher to take back home.
Emmanuel persisted, against the obvious odds, throughout World War I and then right through the much greater ravages of World War II. By that time, his son Emmanuel had become involved, and a winery was built at Jetties Wharf in Marsa. The wine was sold under the Flora label, and it was not until 1955 that the name which continues to resonate in the minds of the Maltese public was coined – Lachryma Vitis. The idea was Emmanuel’s. Though most people think it means ‘tears of life’, the actual meaning is ‘tears of the vine’, and the reasoning behind it is that the vines are extremely stressed in the Maltese summer and ‘weep’ their wine.
Lachryma Vitis was heavily promoted by the standards of the time, and became a major seller. It made the Delicata name and at the same time took that name away, because the winery was known henceforth as tal-Lachryma Vitis rather than Delicata. In the 1990s, the name was changed formally to Emmanuel Delicata Winemaker. In the 1960s, Emmanuel’s three sons, George, Anton and Gustav, joined him in the winery business. Malta was booming, and the modern methods of marketing and advertising were beginning to have an influence on the way business was done in the islands. “Between us, we pushed the winery towards a more commercial approach,” says George, who now runs the business with the help of his two sons Mario and Michael. They built a new winery building, at the present location in Swansea Street, Marsa, and began to develop new products that would move the business ahead.
George grew up with wine, and has childhood memories of barrels of wine being offloaded from horse-drawn carts. Ħwienet tal-inbid were still a feature of Maltese village life at the time. Wine was sold by the pinta – not an English pint, but the equivalent of a tazza te, and served in the same kind of glasses as tea was. There was rigid price control on wine in those days, George remembers, like the price control on the Maltese loaf. Wine, until it was overtaken by beer, was the daily alcohol of choice for men from all walks of life. Men didn’t go down to the village square for a birra, but for a tazza nbid.
In the 1970s, Delicata’s landmark wines Green Label and Red Label were born, to huge commercial success. Almost overnight, they became Malta’s best-selling wines. “They’re probably still the country’s best-sellers,” George says, but he stops short of specifying just how many bottles are sold each year. The wines were made from Malta-grown grapes, largely because there were protectionist policies in place that prevented the importation of everything that could be made or grown in the Maltese islands. In 1987, when the import restrictions were relaxed, Delicata began importing grapes, with the proviso that they would continue to take up all the Malta-grown grapes that they had been buying until then. The winery, which had been restricted by the relatively small quantities of grapes that it could find on the Malta market, suddenly had plenty of scope for growth. “That gave us a breath of fresh air and the room to grow,” George explains. “We could use grape varieties that weren’t grown in Malta, and there was plenty of opportunity for experimentation and the development of new wines. There were fears for the future of Maltese grape-growers, of course – but I always maintained that importation was never going to be more than a temporary bridge to the indigenous development of the wine industry.”
Not long afterwards, encouraged by the success of its new wines, Delicata started its ‘vines for wines’ project, helping growers in the Maltese islands to invest in new vineyards and to grow different grape varieties, rather than focusing solely on the indigenous Girgentina and Gellewza. This programme of cooperation with the vine-growers turned out to be far-sighted, and ensured that the winery was well-placed to ride out the changes brought about by Malta’s accession to the European Union. This meant that the protectionist levy on imported wines was removed, and the market was flooded with wines from all over the world, some of them very cheap and not necessarily any good – but to the uneducated palate, wine was wine and one bottle was pretty much the same as another, so it was only the price that mattered. Delicata feared that even its reasonably priced Red and Green Labels would take some ferocious knocking, but after a temporary dip that marked the period when people were experimenting with the new wines on the market, sales recovered and have stayed steady. On a price for price basis, people were happy to stay with the familiar, and to go for something Maltese of superior quality.
It was with the mid- to top range wines that Delicata took the greatest blows. Its premium wines, developed through considerable investment, were fighting a pitched battle against an army of bottles from all over Europe, the Americas, Australia and South Africa. In the immediate aftermath of accession to the EU in 2004, lots of people didn’t know much about wine and began buying on the basis of erroneous assessments of price versus quality, the assumption being that all Maltese wine was by definition inferior to all imported wine. Just four years later, that way of thinking has been eroded by public information campaigns and educative advertising. Investment in research and development of top-quality prestigious wines like Gran Cavalier has gone a long way to raising the profile of Maltese quality wines, too. People are beginning to change their way of looking at the situation. They have moved from ‘expensive for what you get’ and ‘expensive for a Maltese wine’ to ‘this is very competitively priced for such a good wine.’ “We took a lot of knocks after 2004,” George Delicata says. “But that helped us come forwards fighting, and the prospects now are good.” The winery has no estate-based wines, but several wines that are made from Malta-grown grapes. The Medina range, which includes nine wines, is the main brand. Delicata has also continued to work with the true Maltese grape varieties Gellewza and Girgentina (“DNA testing shows that they are unique to Malta,” George Delicata points out.) Delicata’s most recent project has been the development of its D.O.K., or certified controlled origin, wines. These are going a long way towards furthering the premium image of Maltese wines, and have helped ensure that the days are long gone when people turned up their noses at Malta-grown wines. To do so now would be to reveal little more than ignorance.