Emmanuel Delicata played a role in changing the cottage industry of hundreds of vintners hawking wine in bulk from barrel and horse-drawn carts to a business dominated by fewer players marketing wine in labelled glass bottles.

Emmanuel Delicata, one of the seminal figures of the Maltese wine sector, passed away peacefully on Christmas Eve aged 98.

Early in life he was enamoured of wine while growing up in the wine business his father Edoardo had started. Then, in 1936 at the tender age of 19, young Emmanuel was entrusted with the running of the family winery following the sudden demise of his father.

Emmanuel soon made his own wine under the Lachryma Vitis label which remains a household brand in Malta. The Latin name means ‘tears of the vine’ and was actually an affectionate choice by the late winemaker who was impressed by the suffering of the vines under the hot Maltese sun. Different wine styles and other popular ranges such as Green and Red Label followed.

He took what had started off, as many of the world’s leading family winemaking firms, in a modest, humble way and lay the foundations for Delicata, now Malta’s most awarded winery. During his professional life, Sur Manuel, as he was colloquially known, was a respected business and a family man who also gave back to the community helping philanthropic initiatives.

Few other winemakers have seen as many industry changes as those that took place throughout his lengthy tutelage, especially immediately after World War II.

Slowly but surely, with capital investment and entrepreneurial acumen, Emmanuel played his role in changing the cottage industry of hundreds of vintners hawking wine in bulk from barrel and horse-drawn carts to a business dominated by fewer players marketing wine in labelled glass bottles rolling off semi-automated filling lines.

Rudimentary crushing machines for the making of wine which served as a staple diet beverage werereplaced by modern technology for crafting fresher wines. Field blending of interspersed grape varieties was faded out as verbal agreements with grape growers were renewed vintage after vintage.

Emmanuel, equipped with his own dark room, was also an avid photographer of Maltese vineyards and his winery then located atJetties Wharf. Looking at copies of his vintage pictures hanging on my office wall, I sense that this always perfectly groomed, well-spoken and eloquent gentleman would have loved to put his hands in the soil. Instead he became a visionary who put his soul in the wine.

He was an advocate of Malta’s Girgentina and Ġellewża grape varieties long before indigenous varietals became as much attention-grabbing as wines made from international varieties.

I have fond memories of speaking with him briefly at the Delicata Classic Wine Festival in his hometown Valletta, which he attended till late in his retirement, and remember thinking how this pioneer didn’t jump on a bandwagon – he was pushing it from the very start.

By the mid-1960s, the winemaking firm moved to its current site in Marsa. Bolder investments were made in a new purpose-built winery further modernised and managed by V. George Delicata, one of Emmanuel’s four children.

Emmanuel was still present in the early stages of the emergence of Malta’s modern wine industry for which he helped pave the way. The Delicata legacy of crafting fine Maltese heritage wines of pedigree is poised to go on with the present fourth generation.