Our Vision
“Delicata’s vision is to create premium quality Maltese wines and be Malta’s leading winery by excelling in growing grapes of outstanding quality and crafting well-made wines of international standard whilst providing quality service to our clients and community. In doing so we aspire to help place Malta firmly on the World’s wine map as one of the finest wine producers in the Mediterranean.”
We shall try and accomplish this goal by providing a service to our contracted vignerons to ensure they produce premium quality grapes that reflect the unique characteristics of the vineyards of Malta and Gozo. We shall use those grapes together with state of the art technology, skills and innovation to craft fascinating wines that the consumer can rely on for quality, consistencyof flavour and value. We endeavour to service all our customers in a professional, passionate and positive way that will instill confidence in the name of Delicata and the winery’s portfolio of wines.
Deeply Rooted
In 1907 Eduardo Delicata started off his wine business, as did many of the worlds leading family winemaking company’s, in a small, private way, by just making and selling his popular wine to friends and family. Grapes were purchased from farmers and the pressing was carried out with the most rudimentary of crushing machines. The finished wine was then sold from a horse drawn cart around the villages and towns of Malta.
By 1936 the reputation and demand for his wines had grown significantly and a thriving wine business was placed in the hands of his son, Emmanuel Delicata, at the tender age of 19, following the sudden death of his father. The company employed 10 people at that time and the operation consisted of both making the wine and selling it directly from wooden barrels.
Wine shops in the towns and villages were supplied with the barrels, whereby they, then sold the wine on to their customers by either a pinta (pint) or a terz (a third of a pint). One pint cost approximately one half penny. The bottling of wine in Malta only began after World War II, before that wine was sold ‘loose’ or in bulk. Even housewives would go to the wine shop with a jug or a bottle and buy the family’s wine from there.
After the Second World War Emmanuel Delicata took the wine making business to a new level by introducing a more commercial approach and in the mid 1950’s Lachryma Vitis, Malta’s oldest wine brand, was launched onto the Maltese market.
By the mid 1960’s the wine company moved to its present site where it invested in a new purpose built modern winery. In the late sixties the present day winemaker Managing Director V. George Delicata (Emmanuel’s son) joined the company. Over the next 20 years he refurbished the winery and since he has never stopped looking to innovate. The latest, modern winemaking technology includes stainless steel temperature controlled fermentation vessels, specialised Ganimede tanks, micro-filtration, French and Amercan oak barrels for maturation as well as as a customised bottling and packaging line. And, when the Islands’ viticulture was next to be developed, the government based their plan to achieve this on the Delicata ‘Vines for Wines’ project that George Delicata set up in the early 1990’s.
The Delicata ‘Vines for Wines’ project headed by a team of viticultural experts has gone from strenght to strenght. At the time, together with the farming community, they planted hundreds of vineyards throughout Malta and Gozo using modern planting methods and drip irrigation. The varieties planted include the two indigenous grapes and over 20 more international varieties. In 2007 Malta’s QWPSR system was introduced and Delicata’s wines were labelled D.O.K. and I.G.T. in December 2007 for the first time: 100 years after Eduardo Delicata started pursuing his abiding passion.
