Maurizio Viroli Dan Vittorio Segre

The Bosca Story

CENTRO PER LA CULTURA E L’ARTE

LUIGI BOSCA

Maurizio Viroli lives and works in Italy andthe United States, where he teaches Political Theory at Princeton University. He has writtenmany books, including For Love of Country(1995), The Smile of Niccolò (1998), and Republicanism (1999).

Vittorio Dan Segre is the director of theInstitute for Mediterranean Studies atthe University of Lugano. He has writtennumerous books including: Memories of afortunate Jew (1985) and The private war ofLt. Guillet, the Italian Resistance in EastAfrica (1993); Memories of a failes diplomat(2004).

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Centro per la Cultura e l’Arte Luigi Bosca - 4

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The Bosca StoryMaurizio ViroliThe wisdom of wine

Dan Vittorio SegreThe history of a wine family

CENTRO PER LA CULTURA E L’ARTE

LUIGI BOSCA

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Translation by Antony Shugaar

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To those who love ideas

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THE WISDOM OF WINE

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In our cultural tradition, the grapevine and wine itself have been seen above all as symbols of fertility and rebirth. Perhaps the best known ex-ample is the story of Lot and his daughters as recounted in Genesis: “And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. And the firstborn said unto the younger: ‘Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father’”.

Equally well known is the myth of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility who was killed and descended into the underworld, and who returned to life in a clear reflection of the symbolism of death and resurrection peculiar to the grapevine and wine. The most powerful im-age of the grapevine as a symbol of resurrection however is that of Christ as the “true vine”: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can

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ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for with-out me ye can do nothing”.

Besides being a symbol of fertility and rebirth, wine has always been a symbol of intoxication, sexuality, and pleasure. Suffice it to quote from the Song of Solomon: “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves ... I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like ap-ples”.

Wine, according to one Persian poet, quenchesthe torment of love:

Fill, fill the cup with sparkling wine, Deep let me drink the juice divine, To soothe my tortured heart;For Love, who seem’d at first so mild, So gently look’d, so gaily smil’d, Here deep has plunged his dart.

Wine offers the only possible joy on this earth:

Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur’d–“While you live “Drink!—for once dead you never shall return”.

And wine lightens the burden of life:

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Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little wayTo flutter and the Bird is on the Wing.

There is yet another aspect of wine that I would like to explore here, both because I be-lieve it to be of considerable cultural value, and because it is generally overlooked, or at least given less attention than the other themes. I am referring to wine as a guide and as the embodi-ment of a certain kind of wisdom, different from the wisdom of the sage who is impervious to passion or the saint who has conquered all de-sires on the path to eternal beatitude. The wis-dom that wine stimulates and embodies is a human wisdom with a light touch, a wisdom that is entirely compatible with passions and desires, a wisdom that, as Machiavelli put it, is able to “adapt to and understand the times and pattern of events”.

First of all, there is the wisdom of the farmer, who knows how to choose the best soil and to find the proper exposure and lay of the land. As Columella wrote in De Re Rustica: “The wise farmer will have discovered by test that the kind of vine proper for level country is one which endures mists and frosts without injury; for a hillside, one which withstands drought and wind. He will assign to fat and fertile land a vine that is slender and not too productive by nature; to lean land, a prolific vine; to heavy soil, a vigorous vine that puts forth much wood and foliage; to loose and rich soil, one that has few canes. He will know that it is not proper to commit to a moist place a vine with thin-skinned fruit and

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unusually large grapes, but one whose fruit is tough-skinned, small, and full of seeds”.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the wis-dom of wine, however, has to do with the special relationship between wine and truth.

When we speak of wine and truth—consider the Latin expression, in vino veritas—we gener-ally mean that wine is a way of peering inside a man, because wine leads a man to relax his defenses, his self-control, and all his various de-ceits; it can also mean (though this is clearly a related idea) that wine reveals a man’s real thoughts and feelings. The context is that of a meal, or to be precise, a symposium. It is here that wine reveals the true mind (soul) of one’s dining companions; it distinguishes true and re-liable friends from the rest. It is in this sense that Aeschylus says that wine is a mirror of a man’s true thoughts.

There is yet another aspect to the relationship between wine and truth that emerges primarily from an analysis of the Greek terms αληθης and αληθεια. The words αληθης and αληθεια refer in ancient Greek to a person who speaks, who tells truth. This means that the relationship be-tween wine and truth is rooted in the observation that the effect of drinking wine is to reveal the character of a person to the eyes of another per-son; but it also indicates that telling the truth (in the sense of αληθης and αληθεια) implies self-awareness and intention. To say that wine reveals the truth, therefore, cannot mean that wine leads a person to reveal his or her own nature involuntar-ily or unconsciously simply because he or she is in a state of drunkenness or intoxication.

Finally, it should be noted that the truth that

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wine reveals has the important characteristic of being the whole truth. Truth must be whole if it is to be truth, without censure or reticence. To tell the truth, then, means telling all that you see, know, or think, without exaggeration or inven-tion. The truth of wine, then, is as much the opposite of forgetfulness or oblivion as it is the opposite of lying. The guests at a banquet or symposium, then, had a duty to reveal their thoughts candidly, without concealing or with-holding any details out of considerations of op-portunity or privacy; at the same time they were responsible for the things they said: lies and ex-aggerations were grave violations of the rules of the symposium.

And yet many philosophers have written that wine has little or nothing to do with wisdom and the search for truth. Wine has the effect of tempo-rarily canceling reality, while the sages counseled eliminating fears through a proper understanding of one’s nature and one’s soul. Philosophy meant freeing man by clarity of thought; wine freed man through forgetfulness. It should come then as no surprise that Plato leveled a stinging reproach against wine: “Athenian Stranger: [...] When a man drinks wine he begins to be better pleased with himself, and the more he drinks the more he is filled full of brave hopes, and conceit of his power, and at last the string of his tongue is loos-ened, and fancying himself wise, he is brimming over with lawlessness, and has no more fear or respect, and is ready to do or say anything.”“Cleinias: I think that every one will admit the truth of your description.”

Wine leads to oblivion, the mollis inertia, orsoft indolence, described by Horace:

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You distress me, honest Maecenas, by asking oft, why soft indolence hasdiffused as great forgetfulness over my inmost senses as if with parched throat I had drained the bowl that brings Lethean sleep...

Horace recommended moderation as a safe-guard against the dangers of wine, and at times, abstinence. Just when wine might seem to lead one farthest astray from wisdom, however, it ac-tually opens new dimensions to one’s under-standing, dimensions of irrationality and poetic expression, two forms of experience that rival rational cognition in importance.

Evoe! my eyes with terror glare; My heart is revelling with the god; ’Tis madness! Evoe! spare, O spare, Dread wielder of the ivied rod!

In feasting and the pleasures of wine, there are occasions when one may—indeed, when one must—go beyond the modus recommended by Horace, venturing into the irrational territory of Dionysus:

Are Bacchants sane?Then I’ll be sober. O, ’tis sweetTo fool, when friends come home again!

In the midst of a banquet, only a madman re-strains himself from indulging in the pleasures of food and wine, scrimping with a view to posterity. Wisdom calls for one to abandon ordinary mod-eration and to accept the lure of wine, experienc-ing intoxication and yet, at the same time, behav-

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ing with decorum in accordance with the context:

And be for once unwise. When time allows,’Tis sweet the fool to play.

The foolishness and forgetfulness of the wise man are in any case shortlived (stultitia brevis), and should be limited to specific occasions. The ability to give in to oblivion and abandon are qualities of the truly wise, who do not expect an individual to allow his or her vitality to lan-guish in order to preserve a serene—but drab—wisdom. Wine offers a considerable assistance to wisdom when it brings oblivion to cancel a miserable and disconsolate reality, replacing it with a warmer and lovelier reality, however much it may be limited to hope and illusion. The fantasy of a new reality which wine helps to create makes it possible to move on, to over-come black moments, to begin anew. That is hardly a trifling assistance; when one is experi-encing desolation and dejection, the ability to dream of a bright new day is a great help. Wine opens new doors and offers life and hope, as Baudelaire wrote:

The unexampled ogle of a whore glinting toward you like the silver ray the wavering moon releases on the lakewhen she would bathe her listless beauty there;

the final bag of coins in a gambler’s fist;the cavernous kisses you get from Adeline; the maddening tune that will not let you go, as if it echoed faintly all of human pain—

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none of that, my Bottle, can comparewith the remedy your long green curves supply to the worshipful poet’s ever-thirsting heart;

for him you pour out hope and youth and life—and pride, the beggar’s treasure! give us pride that makes us winners—we shall be as gods!

[translation by Richard Howard]

Wine softens and lightens and renders more human the virtues of philosophers. Even Zeno, who denied that a wise man could properly be-come drunk, replied to those who criticized him for indulging in wine, that “even lupines, which are bitter, become sweeter if they are soaked”. Chrysippus distinguished clearly between drink-ing wine and becoming drunk, which encour-ages the black humors and fosters foolishness. To Lenante drunkenness could hardly help but have a negative influence on the knowledge and understanding of a wise man. To some (and among them was Chrysippus, at least according to his serving wench) drunkenness affected one’s legs but not one’s head. By this Chrysippus meant to say, as I have already noted, that a wise man is able to preserve a certain lucidity and proportion when he crosses with wine the thresh-old of intoxication.

In the classical tradition, there were those who condemned intoxication for wise men, while oth-ers felt that there was an acceptable level of intoxication which took one close to the level of foolishness but stopped just short. Intoxication, wrote Philo of Alexandria, is in no way indecent for the wise man; to the contrary, it sweetens and softens his austere and sometimes fierce appear-

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ance: “For the wise man becomes a more genial person after indulging in wine than when he is sober... We must remark furthermore that the countenance of wisdom is not scowling and se-vere, contracted by deep thought and depression of spirit, but on the contrary cheerful and tran-quil, full of joy and gladness, feelings which often prompt a man to be sportive and jocular in a perfectly refined way. Such sportiveness is in harmony with a dignified self-respect, a harmony like that of a lyre tuned to give forth a single melody by a blending of answering notes”.

The wise man, then, can become drunk be-cause drunkenness helps to form one’s character, offering relaxation and simplicity. Wine, moreo-ver, tends to amplify the intrinsic qualities of an individual, whether good or bad, including mas-culine virtues. For that reason, in Horace’s day it was said that even Cato the Censor enjoyed drinking pure wine, and it was felt that the moral authority of the great Cato was no less in stature than that of the strictest Stoic philosophers.

Even though he shared the ideas of the defend-ers of wine, Horace never accepted its function as a source of inspiration for poetry, and in a letter Horace once sketched a caricature of poets who stink of wine from the early morning. He meant to say that getting drunk was not enough to make one a poet, not that wine needed to be banished from the realm of poetry.

Wine is a means to attain knowledge of truth and wisdom. Noah drank wine, became drunk, and was found naked. Nakedness, wrote Philo of Alexandria, means incapacity to distinguish be-tween the two opposites of moral good and evil, or it can signify innocence and simplicity of

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manners; but it can also indicate truth, under-stood as the power to reveal, to uncover what is wrapped in obscurity. Wine in the story of Noah’s drunkenness makes men naked, i.e., pushes us to reveal ourselves and, at the same time, gives us that capacity to reveal others. Sometimes it reveals vice, at other times, virtue because, as Philo explains, we cannot show or ward off one or the other: if we follow vice we abandon virtue and vice versa.

Wine, on the other hand, is forbidden to those who must attain that higher form of wisdom con-tained in the knowledge of divine mysteries rep-resented by the tabernacle or the altar. The duty of a priest is to administer sacrifices, and the administration of sacrifices demands that one’s mind be clear, and not muddled by the folly that wine creates. For this reason, the Lord forbade Aaron from drinking when he entered the taber-nacle. Abstinence is the price of becoming a priest, and more in general it is the price that must be paid by those who aspire to cultivate reason in its highest and purest form, reason that rises to sublime thought, leaving behind all that is low and squalid.

Saints, like priests, should abstain from wine. Samuel, the greatest of the ancient kings and prophets, never drank intoxicating wines or liq-uors till the day he died. Samuel, however, was not an ordinary human being made up of a body and a soul, but a pure soul who found satisfac-tion only in worshipping and adoring God. His very name means “named and ordered for God”; the name of his mother, Hannah, means grace, signifying that without the help of divine grace it is impossible to abandon the world of the mortals

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and remain eternally in the company of the im-mortals. Those, then, who wish to follow eternal reason and attain understanding of the truth of God must pursue purity of the soul and shun the passions that might disturb their inner tranquil-lity. Those on the other hand who do not aspire to reach the perfection of wisdom, priesthood, or sainthood—but who are rather seeking an imper-fect and entirely human wisdom—may seek help from wine.

One last and fundamental aspect of wisdom is the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and changing demands. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote to Giovan Battista Soderini in 1506, “And truly, anyone wise enough to adapt to and under-stand the times and pattern of events would al-ways have good fortune or would always keep himself from bad fortune; and it would come to be true that the wise man could control the stars and the Fates. But such wise men do not exist: in the first place, men are shortsighted; in the sec-ond place, they are unable to master their own natures; thus it follows that Fortune is fickle, controlling men and keeping them under her yoke.” While men in general are unable to adapt to and understand the times and pattern of events, wine, instead, has always shown a remarkable ability to change form and adapt to different cir-cumstances and conditions.

Over its long history, in fact, wine has assumed various forms, gradations, and compositions. One of the reasons for producing inferior forms of wine was unquestionably the need to supply urban and rural laborers with a cheap beverage that could be consumed in large quantities, pro-viding the sort of energy that food alone could

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not give. It may be worth mentioning, in this context, that in the nineteenth century it was customary to supplement farmworkers’ salaries with the so-called vinello, which, though of “abysmal quality”, as an agrarian investigation undertaken in 1881 noted, was “more comforting than water”. The study went on to point out that “the reasonably well-to-do farmworker ate bread and soup during the week, with meat and un-adulterated wine every eight days, but ordinarily made use of vino piccolo or vinello”. There were two ways to consume wine, then; on an everyday basis, wine was watered down, while on special occasions, wine was consumed straight, in its “high” form. If inferior qualities of wine had not been available, the alternative would have been, obviously, mere water.

“Mere water,” because in agrarian Italy wine was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a fundamental source of nutritional energy that of-ten took the place of bread, at least in part. Au-thors writing about the relationship between nu-trition and labor in the nineteenth century pointed this out: with a “glass of good wine in his stom-ach, a worker can do without a few pounds of bread”. The socialist author Edmondo De Amicis went so far as to write that wine was “the second blood of the human race”, and that it strength-ened the arm of the laborer, made people sing and laugh, warmed up the elderly, helped the sick to recover, and “added a smile to friendship and a spark to romance”.

The inferior versions of wine were, all the same, quite common even before the nineteenth century. “With the lees and the scavenges of the barrels”, G.B. Croce wrote at the turn of the sev-

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enteenth century, “you will make wine for the servants”. Less brutal, A. Gallo praised a vinello made by keeping the barrel full with the addition of half-wine and half-water, producing a blend that was known as the “beverage of the poor,”because “at little expense it yields abundantly, and it is impossible to drink it save in modera-tion, because it has such a bite to it.” Alongside wines of high quality there has always existed a variegated universe of lesser wines, known vari-ously in Italy as vinelli, mischiati, and terzanelli. These wines represented for many centuries al-most the only kind of wine that the lower classes consumed on a regular basis.

Wine has given a demonstration of wisdom in its capacity to alter its form in order to become not only more accessible to the working class, but also particularly alluring to the privileged classes. Perhaps the most significant example of wine’s capacity to transmute itself is probably the creation of champagne somewhere between the late seventeenth century and the early eight-eenth century. It is said that the new wine-mak-ing technique was pioneered by the cellar master at the abbey of Hautvillers, Dom Pierre Pérignon, though no documentary evidence survives of his existence. The enterprising cellar master, Tim Unwin writes in his book, Wine and the Vine, “Eager to improve the quality of the abbey’s wines ... reorganised its vineyards and began se-lecting specific grape varieties, most notably Pinot Noir, for its wines. Moreover at the vin-tage, he chose individual panniers of grapes, which were blended together to produce the par-ticular wine that he wanted. These grapes were pressed rapidly, to minimize contact with the

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skins, and the fermentation produced an almost white still wine which was known as vin gris. The result was a high quality wine, which could sell at premium prices.” It was later discovered that this type of wine, after a few month’s bottle-ripening, develops a distinctive effervescence; this new characteristic made the wine even more exquisite, and ardently sought after by those who could afford it. The new product, as we know from Sir George Etherege’s play, The Man of Mode; or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) was called “sparkling champagne”.

Another significant example of the metamor-phosis of wine to suit refined palates come with the creation of Port, toward the end of the seven-teenth century. Port, like champagne, was bottle-aged. The chief characteristic of Port, however, is that it is a wine fortified by the addition of brandy. Port, like champagne, appears to have been invented by an abbot, and specifically by the abbot of the monastery of Lamego in the high valley of Duero. After persuading two Eng-lish merchants to purchase a certain quantity of Pinhão wine, the abbot explained that he had added brandy during the fermentation in order to enhance the wine’s sweetness and to increase its body. Whether or not the story is true, it is an ascertained fact that from 1670 on it became com-mon practice in northern Portugal to fortify wine with brandy, and in 1680 English merchants be-gan to buy large amounts of the new wine. When they realized that the port had to be left to age for some time, so that the wine and brandy could blend properly, they started leaving it to mellow in wooden barrels.

Because of its capacity to adapt to different

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times and varying demands, wine deserves spe-cial praise; we should not forget its remarkable properties of lightening the mind and strength-ening the heart. In this connection, we must nec-essarily let Shakespeare’s Falstaff have the last word: “A good sherris sack hath a two-fold op-eration in it. It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy va-pours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delecta-ble shapes, which, delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood; which, be-fore cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this val-our comes of sherris”.

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THE HISTORY OF A WINE FAMILY

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MOSCATO AND SPUMANTE

Anthropologists distinguish between groups in which identity is determined by the mother and those in which identity is determined by the father.

Something of the sort may perhaps be said about wines as well. There are wines that take their names and identities from a certain region, such as Asti, while there are others that are known for the type of grape, such as the moscato, or muscat. This grape may take its name—though there are numerous hypotheses, as we shall see—from the noble family of the Counts Muscati di Albiano, just as Barbera takes its name from the noble family of Barbero, Lambrusco from the Lam-brusco di Acquosana, and Greco from the Greco di Canelli. It may well have been this grape, the Greco, that led to the cultivation of the moscato grape in Canelli. It produced a golden yellow grape with coppery highlights that yielded a strong sweet wine, much sought after and quite costly.

Nowadays, many wines are identified by both mother’s and father’s name: this is the case, for instance, with Moscato d’Asti.

These appellations are, clearly, more recent than the cultivation of the grapes themselves, recorded as early as Roman times. Pliny and, later, Palladio mentioned viticulture, or the culti-vation of grapes, under the name of “apian culti-vation” because of the attraction that the vines hold for bees. The change of “appellations”, then, seems to have been a product of history rather than of changes in taste or cuisine.

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Moscato di Canelli.

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Following the collapse of Roman administra-tion and the barbarian invasions—Goths, Longobards, Franks, and Saracens, the last of them only ejected from Piedmont around the years A.D. 965-70—cultivating the land on a regu-lar basis was a dangerous occupation which only a few dared to undertake. The roads were poor and were infested with robbers, there were marshes in the lower valleys, and underbrush, scrub, and stands of reeds occupied once-rich farmland. It is no accident that the capital of moscato is called Canelli after the reedbeds, or canneti, where a small settlement once clustered around a fortress, only later becoming a feudal town. At the end of the twelfth century, however, there was already a consortium of noble fami-lies. These families, along with the convents in the area along the banks of the river Belbo, gave new life to local agriculture. This, however, did not ensure an easy life for the inhabitants. Lo-cated as it was on the border of the territories of Asti and Alessandria—two cities torn by fierce conflicts and rivalries—Canelli passed from the control of one to the other, at various times also falling into the hands of the marquis of Monferrato, and the houses of Savoy and Orléans, and even Napoleon.

Until the seventeenth century, it does not seem that grapes or wine were the main source of revenue and sustenance for the local populace. A certain portion of the economic activities that existed even as early as in Roman times—pot-tery, lumber, and wool—had given way to newer and less remunerative activities, those of tinkers and chimneysweeps, for instance. From the eighteenth century on, there is more revealing

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documentation on the cultivation of grapes in the region. Thus, we know that in 1749 twenty-four dozen roots of Barbera sold for 12 lire; that a brenta (50 liters) of “old white wine” sold for 6

lire while “inferior wine” was sold off wholesale for 0.16 lire. There were considerable variations in price. A certain Signor Petacchio, tavernkeeper in Turin, purchased Malvasia wine at Canelli for 15 lire the brenta and “old white wine” for 9 lire, including shipping to Turin (more than 60

kilometers away).Documents of the period do not mention

moscato very often, though before long—to be specific, from 1850 or so—this type of wine be-came a specialty in the area, if not the sole prod-uct.

The muscat grape is a species of ancient ori-gin, which has long been grown around the Mediterranean basin. The origins of the name are unknown. One guess is that the ancient Ro-mans described as “apian” (the term refers to bees; compare the more common English word, “apiary”) those grapes that attracted bees, though from surviving descriptions those grapes were something quite different from what we now think of as moscato grapes. According to this explanation, bees were somehow confused with flies (muscae in Latin; mosche in Italian), lead-ing to the term moscato (muscat in English). It seems more likely, however, that the name moscato derived, as Berta and Mainardi claim in their book about the history of grape growing and wine making in Piedmont, from the Latin adjective muscatum, meaning aromatic. One fact that would seem to confirm this is that in the Middle Ages in Venice, the word for perfumer

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The earliest cellars in Canelli.

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was muschiere while moschea meant a perfumed place.

For many years, moscato was produced as a still sweet wine. Once bottled, it fermented natu-rally, creating a slight golden foam that made it unique and much sought after, perfectly suited for celebrations and parties. Precisely because of these characteristics, Canelli developed a spu-mante industry.

The connection between spumante and love also dates back into the mists of time. Spumante creates an atmosphere that is otherwise difficult to attain through its “indefinable something”, its je-ne-sais-quoi, the sense of lightness, well-be-ing, confidence, and intimacy that no other wine produces.

Pliny noted that the refined, pleasure-loving Roman emperors appreciated the “sparkling wines dedicated to the goddess Augusta” and used them to celebrate rites and in personal cel-ebrations. The chief technical obstacle in those times was the container, which could not with-stand the pressure produced during fermentation.

The ancient Roman spumante—potropum—fas-cinated the poet Virgil as well, perhaps because of its golden filigree of dancing reflections:

He took challenge, and embrac’d the bowl, With pleasure swill’d the gold

Caesar drank it with Cleopatra —even though that was probably a Falernian wine refermented with grapes from the Nubian capital Meroë—while the Salernitan school of medicine attrib-uted medicinal properties to it. “It dispells vapors”, we read in the ninth chapter of Flos

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Medicinae, “It looses full bowels, sharpens the mind, strengthens the hearing, plumpens the body, and fortifies one’s existence”. Poets, for that matter, were in full agreement with the phy-sicians of the time:

Wine is known by taste, clarity, aroma, and color;if you desire to know good wine,it should have five qualities in particular: it should be handsome,fragrant, strong, fresh, and bubbly.

Once the dark ages of barbarian invasion were over, and when people in Europe began once again to think of life’s pleasures, spumante re-turned to favor on the banqueting tables of Em-peror Charles V, King Henry VIII, and popes Leo X

and Clement VII: featured player in the toasts that continued to mark state and personal banquets.

There are practical reasons for the durable popularity and supremacy of spumante: the me-tabolism rapidly absorbs this type of wine, creat-ing euphoria without a rapidly ensuing headache or hangover. This particular quality was well known to the gentlemen of the Belle Époque, who valued it as crucial to the art of keeping their ladies at an ideal level of gaiety and pliabil-ity in the séparés (or private dining rooms) of Chez Maxim’s. The loveliest feminine praise of this type of wine comes from Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, a lady of questionable virtue but great renown, better known as the Marquise de Pom-padour: “the only wine I know that is capable of making a woman lovelier after she drinks it”. In Paris in 1899, a freshly uncorked bottle of cham-

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pagne was found in the study of the French presi-dent Felix Faure, after he died —to the envy, or something approaching it, of his subjects— dur-ing the regular afternoon visit of his lover. In 1932, an American magazine reported that among the indispensable expenses a gallant young bach-elor should put into his budget was the eight dollars that an after-theater dinner and a bottle of champagne would cost. In brief, this bubbly white wine evokes alluring ghosts of long-ago love affairs and flirtatious banquets and so re-mains even now a perfect and romantic expres-sion of the sun-kissed civilization of Mediterra-nean Europe.

Nowadays, though society and its customs have changed radically, spumante still remains the most common link between the rituals of love of the past and those of the present.

Shifting our attention from effects to content, the products of the spumante industry can be broken down into two broad groups: Champagne (and imitations of Champagne) and Asti (and imitations of Asti). Wherever they are produced, around the world, dry sparkling wines are com-monly referred to as champagne; and sweet ones, spumante, which automatically means a sweet Italian bubbly wine.

For many years, Champagne and Asti moved along parallel paths: both were sweet and both were produced, given the limitations in technical knowledge, with the method of fermentation in the bottle.

Moscato grows in Piedmont in the Asti region, in the Monferrato and the Langhe; the wine of these three areas produces the type of spumante known around the world as Asti. It differs from

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Champagne in many details of its taste, but par-ticularly due to a fundamental technical differ-ence: unlike other varieties of sparkling wines, in the production of Asti, the fermentation of the moscato is halted as soon as must is yielded, so that most of the sugar is conserved. The fermen-tation then resumes as it is transformed into spumante, thus preserving intact the precious properties of bouquet and taste.

Long ago, moscato was shipped in barrels made of durmast wood (a type of oak), well seasoned and steam-sterilized, varying in capac-ity from 50 to 200 liters. Now the wine is stored in refrigerated units until it is bottled. From the moscato grape, now used entirely for the pro-duction of Asti and Moscato d’Asti and, in small quantities, Moscato Passito, only a few years ago Moscato Secco and Moscato for vermouth were also produced. The pomace, or pulpy resi-due from pressing, is used to produce a moscato grappa that is unique and inimitable; from the deposits, or lees, of the wine, cream of tartar is obtained; its dark color was compared in several medieval works to the darkness of Hell.

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Pietro Bosca (1799-1887).

39

THE BOSCA FAMILYAND THE WINE OF CANELLI

Here too, the connection is an ancient one. Pietro Bosca, the son of Secondo and Domenica Scaglione, and the first member of the Bosca fam-ily about whom we have documentary informa-tion, was born in the village of Sant’Antonio. This hamlet near Canelli is known as the hill country where the best moscato on earth is grown. It was the Year of Our Lord 1799, a time in which the lives of the peasants of Piedmont were still substantially the same as under the Ancien Régime, even though the French Revolution had occurred ten years before. Napoleon Bonaparte’s first campaign in Italy had not disturbed things much. The juridical and social structure of the countryside was still largely regulated by the “Statutes of Canelli”, a legislation that dated back to the mid-fourteenth century. This legal code imposed a fine of 60 soldi (there were twenty soldi to the lira) to anyone who “pulled a person’s hair, with slapping and punching”; while a fine of 10 soldi and a sound whipping might be imposed upon anyone who of-fered “unjustified” insults to a respectable woman; a farmer who injured anyone caught “stealing grapes or other crops” was not punished. The fines levied against those who entered a vineyard with-out permission probably helped, at least in theory, to protect the harvest: 1 soldo for the theft of a bunch of grapes, or for stealing reeds or willow branches (still used to fasten the grapevines to the cane supports); 2 soldi was the fine up until the first day of August, after plowing, for illegally entering a vineyard; and the fine rose to 5 soldi

40

thereafter. There was no penalty for clubbing or beating one’s wife or children; in extreme cases, the mayor had a certain “right of recourse”.

This legal and social system was certainly thrown into upheaval by the first invasion by French troops in 1796. Napoleon did not actually enter Canelli, but he did fight a battle with the Piedmontese troops not far away, at Cairo Montenotte, where he won a famous victory. General Massena, who ap-parently took lodging on the site, led soldiers so underfed and poorly equipped that they treated civilians with even greater violence than the miliziotti, volunteers or soldiers press-ganged by the government of Turin, who constituted the par-tisan fighters of the time. The worst memory that farmers like Bosca had of the passage of the Napo-leonic troops concerned the assignats with which the French paid for their wine, the livestock they commandeered, and the houses and cottages in which they were lodged. These revolutionary bills of tender were worth less than the paper on which they were printed.

By the time Pietro Bosca was born, the French soldiers were far away, in Egypt, but as late as 1831, when he registered his winery with the public notary of Canelli, he was still assailed by memo-ries of accounts of those assignats.

This small land owner in the valley of the river Belbo had understood clearly that it was not wise to live on grapes alone, as his family had indeed done for many centuries (the name of Bosca appears on the deed of enfeoffment of Canelli to the feudal lord of the region in 1217). Even though the renown of the wine he produced had spread far and wide, reaching Lombardy, Venetia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and even France, to rely on the production of one’s own vineyard was neither sufficient nor

41

Original barrel in which Bosca wines were exported (1884).

prudent in the face of the unpredictable demand of the market. It was better, then, to buy wine from others and then sell it outside of the region.

At a time when Piedmont, newly restored to the House of Savoy, was swept by crop failures, fam-ines, and revolutionary disorders, when the col-lapse of prices was compounded by the incompe-tence of a debt-ridden nobility with huge estates, it was necessary to augment his earnings from the plow, the cart, and the wine press with other sources of income capable of expanding his eco-nomic horizons without demanding excessive in-vestments. The creation of a company seemed ob-ligatory: it expanded his physical role from that of land-owner to a legal role as entrepreneur and mer-chant; it confirmed his transition from the peas-antry to the bourgeoisie: a new social class that, in the Kingdom of Sardinia of his time, was viewed with suspicion because it was thought to be too independent and politically too liberal.

Not that this suspicion worried him unduly. For a

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vintner like him, who set out at least once a year for France at the head of a small caravan of barrel-carts, pulled by pairs of huge Percheron horses, the real concern was bandits and highwaymen. If he wished to cross the high pass of the Colle Turchino and climb down into Liguria and out along the Côte d’Azur, it was necessary to strike some sort of deal with them. Pietro Bosca had learned to make those deals with a mix of wine and money, without ever knowing, before he set out, which of the two would constitute the more effective passport.

There are no surviving photographs of Pietro Bosca. Still, the bust of him that his son Luigi commissioned for his seventieth birthday confirms, with its austere gaze and his recherché little bow tie, the self-satisfied authority of a late-nineteenth-century notable. Also evident here is the develop-ment of the aspirations of an emergent class, deter-mined to adapt to the political and economic changes of its times. For the Bosca family, com-mercial elasticity would in time be transformed into a strategy: that of a constant quest for the new in the context of the permanent.

Pietro Bosca was 44—an old man for fatherhood in those days—when his son Luigi was born in 1843, in the old house of Sant’Antonio. Over the course of twelve years, his company had not grown much, even though the vineyards under cultivation had expanded to four hectares through the govern-ment sales of confiscated church properties.

Luigi (1843-1928) was not his first-born son. Pietro had in fact been married before. His first wife was Maria Teresa Bava, and she had given him two daughters. He remarried, and Maria Barbero was the mother of Luigi. We know that this son left his studies and married early; at the age of 21 he mar-ried Margherita Cortese, who eventually gave him

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Luigi Bosca (1843-1928) with his wife, Margherita Cortese.

four sons and five daughters. Margherita, too, was the daughter of a small landholder, and she shared his busy life. She became his chief adviser and directed the family business during her husband’s long absences. She kept him apprised of the com-pany’s progress, sending him regular reports on the back of post cards that she mailed to the vari-

44

Trademark (1878).

ous hotels where he was scheduled to stop. These brief messages said things like: “sold fifteen brente of moscato to Signor Bacigalupo of Quarto”; “picked up the 300 vineroots to plant in the new vineyard at Monteriolo.” Luigi died at the age of 85, still running his company. He was the first industrialist of Asti to receive the title of Cavaliere del Lavoro (Knight of Commerce) in 1913. He was a patriarch in the true sense of the word, and he had modernized the Luigi Bosca & Figli company, located in Canelli in what is now called the Largo dei Cantinieri (literally, cellarmen’s square), a site that still recalls and honors one of the first clusters of vintners in Piedmont.

For his trademark, Luigi had chosen a significant graphic image: set in a circle adorned by grape-vines, it depicts a lion lying down next to a shield, with the motto Puritas et Cura (purity and care) engraved upon it. At the center of the shield, a hand squeezes a bunch of grapes into a spumante glass. It marked a personal and a programmatic affirmation.

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PURVEYOR TO THE ÉMIGRÉS

While Pietro Bosca had understood that it was necessary to combine viticulture—the growing of grapes—with commerce in order to keep up with the times, his son Luigi was among the first vintners in Piedmont to extend this approach outside of the region’s borders and to accept the challenge of increasingly tough competition abroad as well as at home. He therefore sought out and found customers among those who drank wine not only to quench their thirst, but also to still their longing for their distant homeland. These new customers were Italian émigrés work-ing in France, Switzerland, Germany, and then across the ocean, in North and South America, in Africa, and in Australia.

Luigi Bosca had clearly understood that wine, for émigrés, was something more than an alco-holic beverage: it was a “nectar” that reminded them of their homeland on special occasions and holidays, and of their own home on family occa-sions; something to toast with for successes in business or when someone returned from a long trip, or from a war; something to sweeten fare-wells and to soften the pangs of distance. That “wine from home” was a ray of Italian sunlight, a clod of earth trapped in a bottle or a barrel, a product whose price and prestige were also—and in many cases, primarily—bound up with the flavor of memory and forgetting.

The role of purveyor to émigrés proved to be a successful one for Luigi Bosca. What had been

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Advertisement for the émigrés (1912).

only a hunch at first was over time solidified into a commercial strategy (beginning with the first overseas subsidiary, created significantly not far from the port of Nice in 1860) and developed considerably through his 23 trans-Atlantic cross-ings. Luigi sailed the ocean, first by sail, and later on the earliest steamships, accompanied by master coopers who helped to protect his wine from the effects of long maritime passages (in 1882 a crossing to Argentina took 142 days be-cause of problems with the ship, stranded and awaiting repairs in the Canary Islands).

Buenos Aires was the first overseas subsidiary. Founded in 1889 and run by Luigi’s son Pietro (1865-1928), the office located at number 938 in the Calle de la Libertad had become by the end of the century the “Marca del mayor consumo de la Republica Argentina”. The office boasted seven telephone lines, and vaunted the two-fold title of “Purveyor to His Majesty the King of

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Italy” and “Worldwide Exporter of Piedmontese Wines”. It specialized in Moscato, Malvasia Vecchio, Barbera, Freisa, Nebbiolo, Grignolino, Bracchetto, and Barolo Extra. The only products that were not “family-made” were the Grappa di Moscato, sold in “demijohns with spout” and Marsala Extra Vecchio.

The second overseas subsidiary was located on Staten Island, near New York. It was founded in 1903 in the town of Stapleton and was managed for 16 years by Luigi’s son Carlo (1882-1942). In that office, this scion of the Bosca family worked to earn his father’s forgiveness with commercial success in his “land of exile”. He was seeking forgiveness for the affairs of the heart that years before had tormented his family and scandalized the quiet small-town society of Canelli. Because of the floods that on two separate occasions rav-aged the archives of the Bosca company, no documentation survives of him except for a few photographs and his notes from the round-the-world voyage that he took in 1908 and 1909. It is a pity, because his notes, written in pen and in pencil in a small address-book/diary—which ad-vertised, among other things, postal service be-tween New York and Rome, via London, in 9

days (sic!) and an exchange rate of gold-based Italian lire for gold-based American dollars at 19.3 cents—Carlo Bosca proved himself to be a careful observer, someone who might have been an excellent journalist. He never found the time or the interest, however, and devoted his life to commercial and amorous pursuits. Upon his ar-rival in New York, on 11 July 1909, after traveling to Japan, China, and Canada in a constant search for business, he sighed: “Here begin the trou-

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The plant at Stapleton, New York.

bles, threats, and abuses that make me sad, and which are not to end until September 1909, with a possible permanent and deleterious effect on my moral character. Ah infamous Americans!”.

And still, he managed to enjoy life in New York, strictly “for professional duty”. He became a well-known figure in the Italian community, and “Mister Moscato” before Prohibition.

Abe Buchman—who is still, by fame, skill, and venerable age the wine-industry lawyer in the United States par excellence—often tells how his father in 1919 squirreled away three hundred bottles of Carlo Bosca spumante. Wrapped in silver and gold paper, these bottles were then opened—in the heart of Prohibition—to cel-ebrate Abe’s grandparents’ and parents’ golden and silver anniversaries.

Luigi’s third son, Umberto (1876-1960), was the only Bosca not to pursue the family’s tradition of wine-making. Umberto became an officer in

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Carlo Bosca (1882-1942). Caricature by Enrico Caruso.

the Italian army, and saw combat in Libya and the Balkans. When he died, he had attained the rank of general of infantry; he had many decora-tions, and had been involved in a feat that now seems like a prank of history. He was captured by the Austrians and interned in the town of Dachau; in the last days of the First World War he led a revolt of the prisoners of war, and seized the nearby town that gained such notoriety in the Second World War, yet to come. Umberto Bosca actually served as mayor of Dachau for several weeks following the Armistice.

Giuseppe (1873-1961), instead, remained in Canelli to help his father run the company. In 1910 he married Caterina, the eldest daughter of Luigi Pistone, owner of one of the most impor-tant wineries of the time. Located in the center

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Giuseppe Bosca (1873-1961) with his wife, Caterina Pistone.

of Asti, at the end of a boulevard that shortly thereafter, with the end of the First World War, was renamed Viale della Vittoria, or Boulevard of Victory, the Pistone company produced Asti and Barbera and boasted a huge international clientele. Caterina was not involved in her hus-band’s business, even though she came from a family of successful businessmen. She was a dreamer; she painted with a good grace; she loved flowers, and especially roses, which she raised with a nearly maniacal passion. She spent her life caring for the poor and the homeless.

Giuseppe was the technician who remained behind the scenes but made it possible for the company to function on a day-to-day basis. Working by his father’s side, he faced the nu-merous crises that hit the Italian wine industry in

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Courtyard of the winery during the harvest (1922).

those years: the outbreak of phylloxera, which made it necessary to replant the vineyards of Piedmont; the First World War (Giuseppe fought, as an Alpino); Prohibition in the United States; the liquidation and sale of the New York branch. After his father’s death, he survived the Great Depression of 1929 and sold off the Buenos Aires branch, which had been left without a director when his brother Pietro died and in 1932 with Calissano, Martini e Rossi, Cinzano, Gancia, Contratto and Beccaro he took part in the foun-dation of the Consortium for the protection of Asti, of which Bosca is still a member.

At nearly sixty years of age he decided to “ab-dicate”. The decision must have been a difficult one for him: the brilliant second-in-charge must not have felt quite up to the difficult task of resolving the issue of inheritance among the members of such a vast family. Unless that thorny issue was resolved in a satisfactory way

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for all concerned, it would be impossible to give the company a secure leadership. He decided to hand over the helm of the Bosca company to his son Luigi (1911-1988), his sole heir. It thus be-came his task to persuade his various uncles and aunts that the company, if competently managed by a single individual who was ready to take risks and relaunch the business, might still sur-vive, even in times that had seen the collapse and bankruptcy of so many glorious and vener-able wineries.

Indeed, while major wineries such as Calissano and Conte di Mirafiori and many other small and mid-sized wineries were falling by the wayside, the Bosca company managed to survive. Luigi, the second member of the dynasty to bear that name, married Carla Ponzone. In her way, she was another Annita Garibaldi, and from the earliest years she followed her husband in his tireless peregrinations around the world. She was a quiet and understated guide who pushed her husband’s fanciful enthusiasms into concrete foundations, without discouraging him in any way. Later, she became a businesswoman her-self, overseeing the public relations and promo-tional activities of a constantly growing com-pany. Luigi died a venerable old man, after radi-cally transforming the family-owned company and, to a certain degree, the way in which grapes were grown and wine produced in Piedmont.

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There is no shortage of medals.

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Major sweepstakes (1940).

55

FROM A NATIONAL COMPANYTO AN INTERNATIONAL COMPANY

Luigi Bosca was educated at a boarding school run by Barnabite brothers in the Piedmontese town of Moncalieri. When he was 20, while he was still studying for a degree in economics at the Univer-sity of Turin, he found himself obliged to take over the family company. Once the issues of in-heritance had been resolved, he traveled in 1935 to Asmara where he established a branch office that successfully exploited the export opportunities that were created by Italy’s war in Ethiopia. By the time he was 25, he had succeeded in restoring the company to financial health: the earnings from exports to Africa were used to relaunch the Bosca company and to finance a renovation and enlarge-ment of cellars, plant, and the family residence, now Palazzo Bosca in the Largo dei Cantinieri.

Business in the Italian colony did not last long however. They were swept away by the Second World War, Italy’s defeat, and the German occu-pation (1943-45). Piedmont was torn by civil war between partisan fighters and diehard Repub-blichini, faithful to Mussolini and Hitler and Canelli was riven by these bloody struggles. On two separate occasions, Luigi came close to facing a firing squad during negotiations over prisoner exchanges.

Once the war was over, he threw himself head-long into the efforts to rebuild. He was convinced that the company had the resources to undertake the old strategy of “purveyor to émigrés”, while

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expanding the company’s activities abroad. Mind-ful of his grandfather’s experience and vision, he focused on the production of spumante, and that activity was to become an obsession for him over the following 25 years.

There were simply too many obstacles to ex-porting wine directly from Italy. If the company was to have any hope of survival, it meant trans-ferring much of its production outside of Italy, and Luigi set frantically to work producing spumante where he thought it might find a market. In 1947, in New York, he rebuilt a commercial network for the distribution of Bosca spumante, taking advan-tage of the prestige that the family name still com-manded. In 1948 he founded Bosca do Brazil in São Paulo; in 1949 a joint venture was undertaken in Mexico City, followed by other ventures in Eu-rope and India. They were not all successful, but they did all contribute to the creation of a leader-ship image for Bosca in the spumante industry.

In the years following the Second World War, Switzerland had the highest number of Italian émigrés. In 1955, Luigi Bosca purchased a com-pany in Manno, near Lugano: the Società Vini Bée. By taking advantage of import tariffs based on the gross weight per bottle rather than the net weight of the wine contained in each bottle (by bottling in Switzerland, it was possible to cut the total tariff by more than half), the company soon conquered a considerable share of a very desirable market, unfazed by wartime destruction and geo-graphically close to Canelli.

Some credit should also be given to a very young technician, Walter Bocchino. Just over 20, in only a few years he had became the general manager of the company, and he quickly transformed it into

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Luigi Bosca (1911-1988).

one of the most important wineries in the Helvetic Confederation.

San Marino is the smallest republic on earth. It is insignificant in terms of market, but as far back as the Fifties, it has always attracted thousands of vacationers, especially Germans, who poured out over the Adriatic Riviera. The Moscato of San Marino, sold locally, was produced everywhere but in the republic itself. Luigi suggested to the government of San Marino that he help create a national moscato industry, beginning with the crea-tion of vineyards with select species of grapes. This led to the foundation of the Società Vinicola del Titano, a company that was given the local monopoly on production of spumante. In 1973 the government of San Marino exercised its option to nationalize the company.

The mines of Belgium were another focal point for Italian emigration in postwar Europe. In 1956,

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at Mons in the Borinage, where even the air is dirty with coal dust, loyal to the principle that Bosca spumante was to follow in the footsteps of the émigrés, a company named Bosca pour le Bénélux was founded. For the following two dec-ades—until 1974, when the European Common Market made its operation counter-productive—Bosca spumante was produced in large quantities in Mons.

It was here that the idea developed of creating a variety of slightly sparkling moscato, particularly suited to the tastes of the Belgians and the Dutch, who were attracted by the charm of wine, but found its natural taste harsh and difficult to get used to. Then and there, the idea was not spectacu-larly successful, but it did constitute a useful early instance of innovative production and market research that later culminated in the remarkably successful invention of Canei.

Another experience with a delayed and unex-pected result for the Bosca company took place in Vienna, the traditional launching ground for trade with eastern Europe. There were few Ital-ians in Austria in the period immediately follow-ing the Second World War, and commercial ex-changes were certainly not made any easier by the rising tensions between Italy and Austria over the disputed territories of Southern Tyrol. All the same, Bosca was strongly tempted to venture into eastern Europe. In 1957 Bosca für Österreich was founded, with headquarters in Erlaa, a few kilometers south of Vienna. The company con-sisted of little more than a basement workspace with some ramshackle equipment operated by six workers. Still, the company began to send out small shipments of spumante to Iron Curtain na-

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The plant for Vini Bée. Stabio, Switzerland.

tions: Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia. In terms of sheer volume, these sales were insignificant, but over time they proved to be very important. The economic re-turns of Bosca Austria were nonetheless so dis-appointing that after ten years or so, the subsidi-ary was shut down. Its operations, all the same, had made the Bosca name familiar in many Com-munist countries, where any western product at all that appeared in the drab and dingy shop win-dows of eastern Europe immediately attracted notice and impressed the public deeply. The Aus-trian “springboard” also helped to establish rela-tionships with the various government organiza-tions that oversaw the import of luxury goods, and to learn to understand their workings and mentality. This experience, though it was mini-mized in Canelli in the Sixties, proved to be in-valuable in later years when Communist eastern Europe began to develop a slowly improving standard of living, and thus began to open its

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The first industrial shed in Baramati, India (1974).

doors to goods other than basic commodities. The Bosca company thus found itself, miracu-lously, in a privileged position compared to other western companies, and able to develop the sale of its products in grand style. It would have been easy to claim, after the fact, that this was a text-book case of entrepreneurial farsightedness. In reality, it was a piece of pure good luck; the kind that Almighty Providence seems to offer from time to time as a reward for an entrepreneur’s determination and courage.

Wholly serendipitous and entirely different, was the establishment of a winery in India, the first and only winery in India at the time.

Pino Cacciandra had guided Luigi Bosca to this distant market, which was moreover dry by reli-gious law. Cacciandra, a former general in the Italian cavalry, and an old friend of Luigi, with whom he shared a great love for horses, was also

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the president of the Bisleri company, which made Ferro China, an extremely popular tonic at the time, and considered an effective health product as well as a liquor. The Bisleri company had long been active in India. With the end of the colonial era, as it could no longer produce liquors, it had begun to bottle mineral water and soft drinks.

The Deccan highland produced excellent table grapes but the local market, following the departure of the English could no longer absorb this produce. Cacciandra, contacted by the local administration with a view to solving this problem, thought that he could manufacture nonalcoholic grape juice. He consulted with Luigi, who could hardly believe his luck at undertaking a project that had all the elements to hold his interest. The blend of a practical industrial vision and the fantasy of a romantic dream led to the creation of a series of wines that were sold, at first, only in pharmacies, hotels, and hospitals, and primarily to foreign customers. Later, the market grew to include the local population, despite the many obstacles posted by religious traditions and bureaucratic inertia. Baramati Grape Industries are now controlled by United Breweries, the prominent producer of spirits of India with an annual output of over six hundred million bottles.

Nowadays in Deccan, in the region of Baramati, lush vineyards planted by the Bosca company with Italian varieties—Barbera, Nebbiolo, Riesling, Moscato, Chardonnay, Trebbiano, and Grigno-lino—provide grapes for the production of Bosca wines and vermouth under the constant passionate supervision of Polina Bosca who has found in India her second home.

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Advertisement from the years of the rebirth (1950-1960).

63

FROM INDUSTRIALIST TO FARMER

In the meanwhile, Italy was undergoing the largest and most peaceful agrarian land reformin its history, with the suppression of sharecrop-ping through all sorts of state assistance offered to peasants to buy land that the large estate hold-ers were no longer able to farm indirectly. Thus, throughout Italy but especially in the north, where reconstruction and industrialization were rapidly absorbing agrarian manpower, a seller’s land market was being created, with far more land available than could be bought up by the former sharecroppers.

Normally, spumante manufacturers like Bosca did not grow their own grapes because the profit margins were too low and, especially, unpredict-able. They generally bought grapes from farmers or else they bought wine produced by cooperative wineries. Luigi Bosca saw, however, an opportu-nity created by the great agrarian land reform, a chance to become a producer of moscato in a new and visionary way. He bought vineyards in the area around Canelli in accordance with a program to radically alter the cultivation techniques, mak-ing it economically more attractive. It was he who introduced, in Piedmont, the system of growing grapevines known in Italian as the rittochino method. The innovation was to change the tradi-tional arrangement of the rows on hillsides from horizontal to vertical. This allowed the grape farmer—through the use of machinery that had hitherto been used only on level land, now oper-able on steep slopes which always produce the

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Polina Bosca supervises her vineyards in Moirano.

finest quality grapes—to reduce costs and labor drastically. This was a simple technical innova-tion, almost disarmingly simple, but it overturned agrarian habits and attitudes that dated back many centuries. The impact that this innovation had on wine production was one of the factors involved in the current development of viticulture in Pied-mont. Even today, credit for this development is rarely given to Bosca. Another consequence of this development was to keep at least a part of the agrarian labor force on the land, instead of flock-ing to the city to work in factories.

The vineyards of Luigi Bosca, later dubbed the “Tenute Luigi IV” on the occasion of the birth of the first grandson who, naturally, bore his name, covered more than 300 hectares when he died. In these vineyards, the traditional farmer had been replaced by farmworkers transported from Canelli each day to work the vineyards. This new activity of Luigi’s, so different from the

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Map of the Tenute Luigi IV.

commercial and industrial activities in which his family had distinguished itself for so many gen-erations, was perhaps prompted by a foreshad-owing of the illness that was to strike him in 1974. It pushed him to hand over the manage-ment of the company to his eldest son Luigiterzo (born 1944) and to retire to live in the midst of his vineyards with the title of honorary president of the Luigi Bosca & Figli company. From that time on this innovator with a complex personal-ity and resolute determination remained outside the operation of the family business. The task of turning it into what The New York Times would eventually describe as “the largest exporter of spumante to America” would fall to the third Luigi in the dynasty.

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USING THE PASTTO INVENT THE FUTURE

The Bosca company, ahead of its time, had decided to consolidate through the acquisition of other wineries. At the beginning of the Sixties, it had purchased the Zoppa company, oldest of the wineries of Canelli, founded in 1810. In 1900

Paolo Zoppa had built an impressive plant next to the railroad line, on the far side of the river Belbo. A huge family palazzo was meant as the sign of a success that however eluded the gen-erations that followed.

When the plant was put up for sale, Bosca bought it and transformed it into a headquarters and center for coordinating its overseas opera-tions.

This was, perhaps, a sign of excessive opti-mism due to the coming clash of the spumante industry—at that point still solidly controlled by Piedmontese companies—with a world economy undergoing rapid transformation. There were two principal factors: on the one hand, consumers were beginning to discover quality wines, and on the other hand consumers were abandoning lower-end wines that for generations had consti-tuted an integral part of the daily fare. Wine was turning, in general, into a refined luxury com-modity. A myriad of talented small-scale entre-preneurs, attracted by the potential of this new and expanding market, set up new wineries, and many of those quickly won international suc-cess. There was a trend toward wines with DOC

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labeling, or denomination of origin, which took their value from the land in which the grapes had been grown as well as from the skill of those who produced that wine.

The foundation of the idea of DOC involves the homogenization of each variety of wine, with the principal properties defined and established by law. Wine became a tool for a new type of artists expressing their own personalities through their wines, marketing these unique, high-quality wines that charmed consumers seeking in refined tastes a confirmation of their social status, especially if that status had been recently attained.

The spumante industry decided to go along with the trend and join the party. Asti too ob-tained the denomination of origin that it deserved for its quality and its history. But while Barolo or Brunello di Montalcino allow the vintner-qua-artist to shape wines that the market demands and purchases through a painstaking specialized production process, aging, and rarity, the indus-trial production of spumante does not allow for such refinements, which for that matter are diffi-cult to perceive in a product of this sort.

Angelo Riccadonna was the only industrialist in the sector who understood the need for a pro-found renovation of the spumante industry, in spite of the obstacles that tradition and entrepre-neurial philosophy placed in the way of a proper reading of the market’s new directions, obstacles beyond which he clearly saw. Although he was conditioned by years of great success in the pro-duction of vermouth and seemed to have no in-terest in entering the spumante market, Ricca-donna understood the importance of what we might call a well-targeted image of novelty. His

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Headquarters of Bosca in Canelli.

President, an excellent dry spumante, promoted with the successful advertising slogan, “Sunday we dine with the President”, made him famous and allowed him to dominate the spumante in-dustry in Italy for many years.

Most vintners seemed to be missing the point that, unlike DOC wines, spumante was losing its status as a hand-crafted product and turning into a commodity. This was a slow process that often eluded the often-haphazard analysis of wine ex-perts, but it was nonetheless an inexorable process.

The numbers spoke clearly: on the one hand, there was a steady growth in consumption and the capacity of new companies to produce in-creasing volume without worrying about image problems; on the other hand, old companies rich in history and tradition, weighed down by their past opulence, were struggling to react and to withstand the competition. The boom in demand

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in the Seventies and Eighties had in some sense prevented them from foreseeing this develop-ment, while a more careful examination of the market might have revealed it as imminent.

That analysis was not done in time for various reasons, first and foremost the lack of a com-pany with leadership in the Asti industry, capa-ble of dominating the market and flourishing with profits taken solely from Asti. Instead, the markets were controlled by two or three major wineries that invested profits from other sources into Asti. Moreover, in the specific case of Canelli, the numerous local companies failed to find a manner and sufficient interest to join forces so as to have the power to enjoy together the prestige of the capital of moscato.

At the Bosca company, there was a clear un-derstanding of the paradox of an expanding pro-duction that was merely hastening the compa-ny’s demise. A tentative suggestion that collabo-ration amongst the big corporations might be an option, made by Luigiterzo in the early Seven-ties, triggered outrage and was quickly aban-doned. It was seen as a response to a crisis, understandable considering the situation in which Bosca was working: crushed by the major producers of vermouth and aperitifs and by new companies, unburdened by tradition. If Bosca wished to survive as an independent family-owned and family-run company, it needed to find a way to reinvent the industry, eluding the crush-ing embrace of conformity and standardization that was only undermining its very reason for existence.

At Bosca the decision was made to change approach radically, though not without consider-

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Enrico Baj. The one hundred millionth bottle of Canei.

able dissent. The new watchword became “use the past to invent the future”. Twenty-five years ago, this concept, later proven successful, seemed like just short than a terrifying heresy; it seemed like utter nonsense. If it was possible at all to swim against the stream, at a time when all the major wineries were expanding, that was only because all of the company’s limited resources were employed to support one belief: it was possible for a family-run company to survive in a time of globalization, as long as that company took advantage of its great flexibility to react to profound changes in the market.

Authority, courage, and perseverance are indis-pensable virtues, but they are not enough to make profound economic and technological transfor-mations occur. The human factor of leadership is

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needed to catalyze ideas and efforts, especially if sustained by an ownership that suffers pain at the spectacle of a family-owned company forced into extinction without a fight.

At the Bosca company, the right man at the right time was found in the person of the new general manager, Mario Martinengo, a Turin-born engineer in his early fifties, previously the CEO of large engineering and electronics compa-nies, in Italy and abroad. With the support of Luigiterzo Bosca, this technician who knew nothing about wine but plenty about marketing developed what many vintners saw as not only unprofessional but impossible to achieve: a to-tally new wine product.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now possible to understand how innovations of this sort encounter psychological resistance. In the case of moscato, in Canelli, that resistance was rooted in history more than in the vineyards themselves. Metaphorically speaking, it was a combination of a blind worship of tradition with the “Palio syndrome”, a reference to a medieval horse race run in Asti that has vied since 1275 with the better-known Palio of Siena.

The worship of tradition encouraged inertia; the “Palio syndrome” was a term used to describe a psychological backdrop of a parochial tribalism, whereby—not unlike the running of the reckless annual horserace—the idea of harming one’s ri-val, or at least seeing one’s rival harmed, was somehow preferable to the idea of seeing one’s own horse and rider (or company) win.

The transformation of “heretical” innovation into a success on the market was found in the “historic collective memory” of the Bosca com-

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New York Times, 7 April 1984.

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pany. In the search for a new product, with all the apprehension that that involved, someone re-membered the old idea, born and laid to rest years ago at Mons in Belgium, whereby an un-successful attempt had been made to develop a type of product that was at once slightly bubbly, with the flavor and charm of wine, but better suited to the preferences of the Belgians and Dutch.

That certain someone was the enologist Francesco Paschina, who had the brilliant ideaof rummaging through the archives of forgotten dreams of the Bosca company for the formula to the new product. The old project was dusted off; new and fundamental technological advances made it possible to revolutionize the manufactur-ing concepts; the vision of that talented techni-cian made it possible to transform a product that had once been abandoned into a wine that would in due time become a milestone in Italian enology: Canei.

And what was it? It was the first wine conceived for non-connoisseurs, a wine for non-initiates: only slightly sparkling, low in alcohol, the product of a careful combination of aromatic wines, very light and delicately sweet; because of its distinctive taste and bouquet, it could be appreci-ated by a far broader public than the usual con-sumers. As is often the case in scientific research, the idea of Canei had roots in the past. In the seventeenth century, in fact, crespia had been a sweet bubbly wine obtained through refer-mentation. It is thought that the name came from the fact that when people drank it, they wrinkled (in Italian, increspare) their brows. It was a first, tentative step on the path of the transformation of

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The courtyard of the Foresteria.

wine into a beverage, lost over the centuries in the welter of changes in taste and economy.

At first Canei met with opposition from ex-perts and connoisseurs who often thought of themselves as high priests of traditional wine-making. Canei was angrily, and enviously, criti-cized with all sorts of derisive terms; “Coca-Cola, Italian-style” was probably meant to be the most hurtful. But that was not how it was per-ceived at Bosca; when the phrase was first heard in the head office, it triggered celebrations. This was a validation of a piece of original thinking, a correct, farsighted, courageous analysis of a mar-ket undergoing radical transformation, but also a new way of conceiving of demand from con-sumers who wanted a different approach from that of the classic vintner.

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Since Canei was something new, it seemed right to give it a new package. In order to underscore its originality, a special bottle was designed with a long neck, much taller than normal wine bottles, and the traditional cork was replaced with a twist-off cap. Initially developed for reasons of appear-ance, this package soon proved to be a major factor in its success, an inadvertent stroke of gen-ius. In fact, the Canei bottle could not fit in nor-mal wine shelving in stores, and as a result Canei was displayed in supermarkets in different areas than most wines. Its unusual shape caught the eye of the shopper, emerging from the clutter of tradi-tional wines and standing out as a new brand of wine: a new style and taste were born.

The first experimental quantities of Canei that were shipped to the United States were immedi-ately greeted with enthusiasm by the retailers. Once again, however, it became clear that strate-gies which may appear eminently logical and even elegant on the drawing board appear quite different on the actual “battlefield” of commerce.

The Bosca company’s previous experience, and simple marketing considerations would have logically meant that America would be the natu-ral safe target for the promotion of Canei. In-stead, success came rolling in from the opposite direction, from a source that no one could possi-bly have imagined, both for economic and ideo-logical reasons: Communist East Germany.

The Bosca company had maintained contacts with this Communist market that dated back to the period of the first tentative business done by the subsidiary in Vienna, long since shut down. In a system like Communism, where the preser-vation of power was a basic reason for survival,

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Chapter of the Universal Order of the Friends of Canei.

bureaucratic inertia was a typical and widespread factor. The officials who had wrestled a decade previous with the serious political problems in-volved in importing a few thousand bottles of capitalist Bosca spumante were the same ones who now faced the daunting political and ideo-logical issues raised by the entry of Canei into the world of German Marxism. This time, how-ever, there was a difference: the bureaucrats may have been the same, the name of spumante may have been the same, but the lack of foreign cur-rency, the ideological puritanism, and the Teu-tonic pride of the Soviet bloc’s economic power-house all clashed with the demand expressed by the populace for something that would break the unrelieved monotony of the socialist people’s daily fare: some small culinary treat from be-yond the Iron Curtain. Italy—which had the larg-est Communist party in Europe—and its foreign policy that was endlessly beckoning to Eastern

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Europe did not scare the German bureaucrats; Canei itself blended the taste of wine with the thrill of sinful bourgeois luxury; and so the au-thorities of Pankow (in east Berlin) did not take long to approve the importation of a luxury item, produced by a company that had not seemed dangerous in the past, a drink that offered an acceptable degree of sinful capitalist ideology.

And so, to the amazement of one and all at the Bosca company, a request arrived in Canelli for fifty thousand bottles, referring of course to the traditional type of spumante, like the old Viennese spumante, by now discontinued. To convince the Communist officials that the new spumante was better than the old spumante —though different in appearance—required lengthy negotiations in which the producer, paradoxically, resisted the pressure of the customer to buy. In the end, the fifty thousand bottles were shipped, in their “vo-luptuous” glass recipients, with elegantly elon-gated necks. And what followed was a boom.

In 1977, the shipments grew from fifty thousand bottles to two million bottles, and the next year, to seven million bottles. In Canelli, it became neces-sary to build a new plant to meet demand. Gino Robba, the owner of one of the largest manufac-turers of a truly glorious vermouth, an aperitif that was becoming unfashionable, decided to sell his company. The facilities of the Robba company were purchased by the new-born Canei SpA, and reconverted for the new production in the space of a few months.

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THE UNITED STATES

In contrast with what was happening in East-ern Europe, market research in the U.S. showed that Canei was encountering resistance among American consumers, not because anyone ob-jected to the taste of the new spumante, but be-cause it was a little too innovative. If the public was going to get used to this new product, it would take an expensive advertising campaign that the progress of sales in the U.S. simply could not justify. And that was how East Germany saved the day. The profits that derived from the unhoped-for and unplanned success of the new Bosca product in the DDR were reinvested in advertising for the American market. Thanks to that investment, the first three containers shipped to the U.S. in late 1975 grew to a stream of twelve million bottles in 1980 and more than twenty mil-lion bottles by 1985.

The story of Canei’s triumph in the United States has its own twists and heroes. “Who the Hell will ever drink this swill?” asked Jack Cohen the first time that he tried it. With Abe Rosenberg, Louis Silver, and Raymond Ochacher, Cohen ran Star Industries of Syosset, Long Island, the company that was going to pro-pel Canei to success in America. Ochacher, the former owner of the famous liquor store in Man-hattan’s Astor Place, on the other hand, fell in love with it at once. A prosperous retiree, with years of experience in the wine business, Ochacher was looking for a way to spend his

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Raymond Ochacher and Luigiterzo Bosca.

leisure time, and he decided to hire a little adver-tising agency owned by Richard Heim to con-quer the American market for Canei. It was a good choice. Heim, a well-read and refined man, succeeded in conveying the message quickly and cheaply, capturing the imagination of a clientele that grew so fast that in a few months the new drink was leading U.S. sales in its category.

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Severino Gazzelloni after a concert in the Sala delle Feste.

ITALY

The Italian market seemed to offer a great deal of sales resistance. In order to break down that resistance, Mario Martinengo developed a spe-cial new transparent refrigerator/dispenser. At the base, there were three spouts into each of which a bottle could be overturned so that by simply pushing a lever, a stream of chilled bubbly Canei would pour into a glass beneath. This remark-able and handsome pourer, specially manufac-tured for Bosca by a company in the Marche region of Italy, was delivered to thousands of bars and cafés throughout the Italian peninsula. The revenue from this operation was minimal, but it was more than paid for by the promotional

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Lecture by Italian president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro at Bosca.

and publicity repercussions. In Italy, sales of Canei reached a level in 1988 of no fewer than three million bottles. One factor that contributed to its popularity at home in Italy was the founda-tion of the “Order of the Friends of Canei”, a gastronomic brotherhood founded and super-vised by Giovanni Goria, a lawyer and a world-famous gourmet, who assembled an array of gourmets from every walk of life—from Italy’s former president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to Giuseppe Lazzati, rector of the Catholic Univer-sity of Milan, from flautist Severino Gazzelloni to popular cabaret singer Paolo Conte, from Agostino Cardinal Casaroli to painter Mino Maccari and sculptor Luciano Minguzzi. These admirers of Canei played a crucial role in open-ing new horizons for a product that offered new opportunities for consumption.

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ISRAEL

In Israel in the Seventies, table wine was not particularly popular, and locally produced wine was consumed almost exclusively for religious use. Barely twenty thousand bottles were ex-ported from Italy to Israel every year. Canei trig-gered a veritable revolution. In the first year, sales topped a million bottles, even before rab-binical authorization was issued, giving it a broad market, in Israel and around the world. The engine driving this popularity was Amiel Epstein, a fascinating character who was successfully carrying on the liquor-importing business that his father founded after fleeing Czarist Russia. Amiel Epstein was a descendant of those first families of idealistic and enterprising Zionist pioneers who were responsible for creating Israel. He immediately understood that in a small, close-knit, gossipy market like Israel, it would be enough to get people to taste Canei and it would immediately begin to sell. Once sales rose above four million bottles a year in a market of three million potential consumers—including children and Muslims—the clash with the vested interests of the few, well-protected local wineries was inevitable. The Bosca com-pany, loyal to its traditional policy of franchising and joint ventures, decided to begin producing its spumante in collaboration with the leading local wine-maker, Carmel Misrahi.

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THE REST OF THE WORLD

At the time, Israel was not the only country where Canei was making inroads on the local market. Canei was also being produced in Sant Joan Despí in Catalonia, near Lille in France, at Linz in Austria, in Brazil at Andradas in the state of Minas Gerais; it was being marketed, moreo-ver, in over thirty nations. This success of the Bosca company, or, to be more precise, of Canei, represented a mystery to the older and, to an even greater degree, the newer wine-making companies. Everyone tried to understand how a family-run company that in the past might have enjoyed a few moments of glory but which later had settled for an existence marked by neither problems nor achievements could then have re-turned so spectacularly to the limelight of the international wine market with a totally new product of its own invention.

Ernest Gallo, the king of California wines, wanted to understand. The son of Piedmontese émigrés, he had entered the wine business with his brother Julio at the end of Prohibition. He had gone on to create the largest wine-making com-pany on earth. He was fascinated—more than worried—by the fact that sales of Canei by Bosca had grown in England, in a single year (1986 to 1987) from twenty thousand to two hundred thou-sand cases under the competent supervision of Lionel Motais (with whom Bosca had entered into a joint venture in the United Kingdom).

This subsidiary, located in a small office in

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Lutterworth, in the heart of England, with a man-ager and two secretaries, had managed to con-quer the British market and, over the course of little more than a year, to transform Motais’s in-vestment from a few hundred pounds sterling into several million.

Ernest Gallo telephoned Luigiterzo, and invited him to come pay a call on him immediately in California. Gallo offered no explanation for the invitation, but he clearly knew that no vintner on earth would turn it down. During the meal he set out for the Boscas in his palatial California estate in Modesto, the reason for the invitation became clear: he wanted to know why a little company like Bosca UK was so successful while his own company, which employed forty and had offices in London, was struggling to establish itself.

The answer, obviously, lay in a rejection of con-formity and a marked capacity for innovation. This strategy, however, entailed risks concomitant with the level of success. Indeed, gratifying though it may have been, the boom in sales of Canei masked a serious risk: it tied the future of the Bosca com-pany to a single-product strategy, with all the short-term advantages and long-term dangers that a “monoculture” entails. There were two alterna-tives, then: either go on exploiting Canei, by this point a mature product, struggling with enormous advertising expenses against imitations and com-petitors, or else sell this “goose that lays the golden eggs”, reinvesting the proceeds from the sale in a renovation of the company.

The decision was made in 1989 with the sale of Canei Spa to the French multinational Pernod Ricard, which even today continues successfully to produce in Canelli.

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Canei.

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The spiral logo of Cora (1930).

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THE ACQUISITIONOF THE CORA COMPANY

Cora was one of the oldest and most illustrious companies in Piedmont. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Rovere, herbalist and distiller with a shop in Turin, was producing cer-tain special aromatic wines, which were called “Vermouth”; the original formulas still survive. Among the vermouths he produced, one was made expressly and exclusively for the Royal House of Savoy, and was described in his recipe book as the “Wine which I make for His Majesty Carlo Alberto”. In those days, the sale of vermouth was limited to the city of Turin. It was only later, again through the efforts of the Cora company, that it crossed the borders of Italy, becoming in just a few decades the most popular aperitif on earth.

On 30 May 1835, the brothers Giuseppe and Luigi Cora purchased Giovanni Rovere’s shop and es-tablished—in a public document drawn up in the presence of the Regio Luogotenente Vicario, a high public official in Turin—the company named Società G. & L. Fratelli Cora. This change in own-ership marked the beginning of expansion for a company that, in 1838, was the first to export ver-mouth di Torino to faraway America, North and South.

The Cora brothers saw their business grow at such a vigorous pace that before long Giuseppe and Luigi decided to move the headquarters to Turin, in the shade of the porticoes overlooking the Piazza San Carlo; before long their company was one of the most important in the industry.

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Document of the foundation of Cora (1835).

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The plant in Boglietto.

In 1854 the Cora brothers opened the Caffè Monviso, in Turin in the Piazza della Legna, later renamed the Piazza Venezia. Built on the rubble of the Caffè Catlin, an old and seedy tavern fre-quented by hoodlums and hooligans, the Caffè Monviso became a historical coffee house, the site of social and political gatherings in the years lead-ing up to the Italian Risorgimento (culminating in national unification in 1861); Luigi Cora was him-self a member of the town council of Turin and an influential participant in various liberal political associations.

In 1859, the Cora company purchased a plant in Costigliole d’Asti, in an area known as the Boglietto; the manufactory had previously been owned by the aristocratic Roero di Cortanze fam-ily, and had been used as a tannery.

After the two brothers died, the helm of the

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Advertisement for Cora Vermouth (1915).

company was taken over by Luigi’s son Enrico (1847-1915), who was in turn succeeded by his own son Mario (1878-1944). Mario succeeded in leading the company to the top of the industry, expanding notably in European and international markets. Mario decided to undertake and expand an adver-tising campaign that made the Amaro Cora—a bitter—into a worldwide success.

Despite that success and despite the company’s great expansion following the Second World War, by the mid-1970s the Cora company too was caught in the general decline of the aperitif market.

Its purchase by Bosca in 1984 was in part a deal driven by a sense of duty: it would have been a blot on the collective honor of the industry for so venerable and famous a name to vanish or to fall into foreign hands. The Cora company—once Canei SpA had been sold—continued a glorious tradition of producing vermouth and spumante.

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THE RESPONSE TO NEW CHALLENGES FROM THE MARKET

The sale of the Canei company pushed Bosca headlong into a new adventure. At stake was more than the development of a new and suc-cessful product. What was required was to face and solve challenges that were far more general, with social, psychological, and financial reper-cussions, as addressed by Peter F. Drucker in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985): in-vestments were replacing the flow of goods as the prime engine of the international economy; automation was making labor an increasingly rare and expensive commodity; the expansion of the service industry was creating a new class of workers that was no longer proletarian or “proletarianizable”, as well as consumers who were conditioned by rapid processes of innova-tion and globalization.

Hence the problems experienced by many com-panies, large and small, in revamping. A necessity that becomes particularly pressing and evident when there is a generational changing of the guard at the helm of a company.

In a certain manner, a company can be com-pared to a soccer team; one difference is that in athletics or sports, a defeat is inevitably accompa-nied by a sense of crisis while in a company, problems can lie concealed for many years behind a series of objective and subjective screens, emerg-ing only when it is already too late to remedy them. Since running a company is like competing

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in a championship season that never ends, the se-cret of survival lies in the capacity and determina-tion to renew and improve constantly. Conse-quently, there is a dangerous tendency, especially in the generations that inherit companies instead of founding them, to focus on administrative is-sues instead of creativity, the old instead of the new, the customary instead of the innovative. The same fate can befall those who are in command for too long or those who—to return to the sports analogy—have won too often and for too long, and who therefore lose their aggressive ambitious edge.

In the case of the wine industry, at the turn of the twentieth century, the names of Gancia, Contratto, and Bosca—to mention only the names that still adorn signs and palazzi in the streets of Canelli—represented the crème de la crème of the world spumante industry. Nowadays, they have lost much of their luster. Bosca (as a producer of wines, vermouths, and classic spumante) is no exception, though it is one of the very few historic wineries still owned by the founding family, free of interna-tional ties that limit the company’s independence.

All of this had a direct bearing on the company’s strategic choices for the future: to decide whether to carry on with a product that was still extremely profitable, but no longer on the rise, or to make a clean break with past and present in order to be-come technologically and psychologically free to pursue an entirely new activity, as yet undevel-oped. Abandon the technical and incremental in favor of the visionary; abandon evolution in favor of revolution. Among the many inspirations for this approach was Nicholas Hayek, founder and chairman of Swatch, the man who restored Swiss

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Important is keeping on the move.

dominance in the world watch market, following the Japanese invasion of the Seventies and Eight-ies, by entirely reinventing the watch as a product, transforming it from a durable object into a frivo-lous impulse sale. Another example, just a stone’s throw from Canelli, was Giovanni Ferrero, who, starting from scratch after the Second World War, had shown that a simple idea, achieved with lim-ited capital, could lead to the creation of a world-class corporation, based on a broad array of inno-vative sweets and confectioneries, responding to (and sometimes creating out of whole cloth) the tastes of a globalized consumer audience.

In the field of wine the weight of tradition seemed to have a disproportionate effect upon the decisions of entrepreneurs. In the industry of spumante, in particular, there had been no particu-lar developments aside from “President” by Riccadonna, mentioned above. Canelli, for more

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than a century the unrivaled capital of spumante, had begun slowly to decline. Bosca would have to face the challenge of this atmosphere of stagna-tion, as well as the increasingly fierce interna-tional competition. That competition left two equally dangerous options open to old family-run companies: either to make a deal with a much larger group in the illusory belief that the new boss would leave the old company independent while offering expert managerial skills; or else produce anonymously for huge distribution chains that offered short-term earnings but which put the now “identity-less” company at the mercy of a few huge clients, with which it now had no nego-tiating leverage.

The decision to concentrate all its resources in the field of spumante was, for Bosca, a natural decision, since this was the only field in which the company had enjoyed any considerable success over the course of its long history. That decision, however, could not be a purely technical one. If the alternative was to produce a cloned commod-ity and lose one’s identity, over a relatively long term, and independence, then it would be neces-sary to opt decisively in favor of independence, and therefore in favor of both non-global products and independent thinkers. The formula that was best suited to the goal at hand seemed to be franchising or joint ventures with small and me-dium-sized local entrepreneurs who were seeking independence and who were willing to handle new products in their territory. The business model was McDonald’s; to imitate the international fast-food giant—with the appropriate modifications—the Bosca company would have to abandon the tradi-tions and mentality of spumante and vermouth.

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RESEARCH AND INNOVATION

If this policy of joint ventures—which had yielded excellent results with Canei—were to continue, however, it was necessary to invent a new product to share financially with new (or old) distributors. The answer could only be found outside of the Bosca company and the general field of wine-making. It was necessary to join experience and tradition with the new solutions offered by science and technology. The links with the past were maintained by continuing the production of high-quality spumante and ver-mouth and DOC wines in directly owned vine-yards. The links with the future, on the other hand, were established by the judicious applica-tion of science and technology in a quest for a new product.

In Canelli there has been—and still exists—a collection of species of grapes, unlike anything else on earth, that contains in a single area over 100 species of moscato of diverse origins. It was created to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Bosca company (1831-1981); the idea was developed by Professor Italo Eynard, who held the chair in viticulture at the department of agrarian studies at the University of Turin. The undertaking received the coopera-tion of scientific institutions in nearly all of the countries with an ancient tradition of growing grapes—France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, the Ukraine, and Armenia—and countries with a

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Collection of species of moscato grapes.

The hillside with the collection.

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more recent history of viticulture, such as South Africa, North and South America, and Australia. The ultimate result of the work being done on this collection of species has been the classifica-tion of the DNA of the diverse varieties of moscato. The collection offers grape-growers around the world ways to improve the quality of their moscato. In 1989, when Luigiterzo Bosca decided, just when Canei was at the peak of its immense commercial success, to sell it, all of this lay in the future. There was a collection of species of grapes, but no one knew quite what to do with it; there was money to invest in the wake of the sale of the Canei brand, but there were no ideas about how to spend that money. At the Bosca company it was generally thought that the first step to take was to engage in a radical trans-formation of moscato from wine into a beverage. This led to the development of the V.E.R.D.I.

project. The initials stood for words that indi-cated the hope of finding—discovering or in-venting—something that would be a “versatile, enchanting, revolutionary, daring innovation”. Fine words that outlined an idea that, in and of itself, was in no way revolutionary; it was sim-ply the challenge of achieving, in the industry of spumante, one of those dreams that had made the fortune of other Italian manufacturers: Ferrero with Nutella, Galbani with Belpaese, and Piaggio with the Vespa.

Over the five years that followed, it was deci-sive for the Bosca company to deploy executives and manpower on a project based on the princi-ple that “what works is already obsolete”. In this specific case, following the voluntary abandon-ment of Canei at the very peak of its success, it

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became necessary to undertake a conversion of concepts and ways of operating. The goal was attained with a shift in production and invest-ment strategy: transform a winery into a research laboratory, linking the production of the future to innovation instead of exploitation of tradition.

The years between 1989 and 1995 were particu-larly difficult. At the Bosca company, in what is now jocularly referred to as the “skeleton closet”, dozens and dozens of bottles accumulated, with every imaginable shape and content, evidence of countless unsuccessful attempts to invent a new and convincing product with which to relaunch the company.

Then someone thought of vermouth. Vermouth had been one of the great industrial products of the nineteenth century, and had created enormous companies that made Piedmont the wine-indus-try capital of the time. Martini and Cinzano were names to conjure with, as famous in their time as Benetton and Microsoft are today. Suffice it to consider that there was a point at which Martini & Rossi’s advertising budget was larger than Coca-Cola’s.

The success of these brands did not derive only from the quality of the grapes, but also by the brilliance of manufacturers capable of capitaliz-ing on a good raw material and creating an “arti-ficial” product (the word artificial is often con-sidered blasphemous but is actually the key to many industrial success stories) that could fulfill a need, perhaps a subconscious need, on the part of the consumer. In the case of vermouth, the artifice was to transform natural products—grapes, aromatic herbs, beets, wheat—into, first and respectively, wine, essences, sugar, and al-

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Polina, Pia and Gigi Bosca in front of the portrait of the founder.

cohol, and then, with painstaking blending, into a delightful product that, oddly enough, became famous with a German name (Wermut), written in the French style (vermouth).

There is a strange reaction found among many wine makers to the success of “artificial” prod-ucts in the industry. Even in the sector of aperi-tifs and liquors, these entrepreneurs continue to vaunt the naturalness of their wines, including their “genuine” spumante, even though it remains an “artificial” industrial product. After all, spumante is a blend, though ennobled by the name of “cuvée”, “carefully spiked” with wine, sugar, and yeasts, along with an injection of vari-ous distillates. Even today we call them, “exoti-cally”, la liqueur, in tribute to the secret of the formula, jealously protected and concealed by the original producers. Perhaps the reluctance of

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vintners toward innovation is the product of hab-its crystalized by the prestige of tradition, pre-venting imaginative leaps that—on the other hand—have made possible both vermouth and, in Bosca’s case, Verdi.

It was, in any case, with a view to vermouth that the company’s research efforts were directed in 1989 toward a program to pursue new develop-ments in the blending of spumante with other alimentary substances.

Nowadays the difficult task of exploring new boundaries has been devolved upon the new generation, the sixth of the Boscas, a family of “spumantieri”, ready to rejuvenate the family tree with new branches. They are determined to keep on improving the company and lead it into the future and, most of all, they are determined to respect the principles of ethics and creativity which have inspired predecessors throughout the centuries.

Pia, an attorney at law specialized in international law, educated at European and North American universities, is at the helm of the company in Canelli.

Polina, a degree of agronomy from the University of Torino, manages the agricultural division of the company. She is in charge of the vineyards spread around the region of Piemonte and of quality control in the overseas production facilities, particularly in India.

Their entrance in the company’s commanding heights introduced among the existing family traditions the innovation of women’s leadership.

Luigi, known as Gigi, a degree of economics and finance from the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, works in the banking

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and financial industry and is longing to swap jobs with his sisters.

This is the new team in charge of passing on experiences, ambitions, responsibilities and fortunes across the millennium. In the process they will do their best to foster and develop the continuity of intents, hard work and creativity that has characterized the Boscas for almost two centuries.

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Bosca are pioneers.

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HARBINGERSOF A REVOLUTIONARY NEW IDEA

If East Germany had been a providential wind-fall for Canei, Russia, fresh from the miracle of perestroika, would serve the same role for the new directions at the Bosca company.

The Bosca name had been familiar in Russia as far back as the nineteenth century, when the first Luigi Bosca first began to export his spumante there. In the Soviet Union the Bosca presence dates back to the first contacts made through the branch office of Vienna: an Austrian adventure, as explained above, that proved a total failure in purely commercial terms but a true blessing over the long term.

Beginning in 1991, the borders of the former Soviet Union had opened wide and chaoticallyto imports from the West on two conditions: that these imports convey a “capitalist” image and that they be available at “rock-bottom” prices. Spumante, along with perfume, jeans, McDonald’s fast food, and thousands of other articles of ap-parent or claimed nouveau luxe, was what a myriad of new Russian importers, suddenly flush with cash and scarcely familiar with the ways of business, were seeking on Western markets.

The Bosca company was not interested in this sort of demand, which demeaned its dedication to quality. For more than a year, there was an exchange of requests and refusals between Bosca and Russian importers. The importers were in-terested in price; Bosca wanted a chance to test

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at least one of the products that were slowly emerging from its research on this new market. It was a rare opportunity in a moment that was unique, both politically and commercially.

Finally, a young Jewish businessman from Odessa who had recently moved to the United States agreed. He had made a considerable for-tune with the coffee he packaged in New Jersey and shipped to the Ukraine. He agreed to acquire the new Bosca product; what he liked about it was the bouquet and the taste; it was not a wine but a beverage that may have been made with wine but with other ingredients as well. He did not mind the fact that it was only 14 proof, or 7

percent alcohol, nor that it was sold not as spumante but simply as “Bosca”.

The first container full of Bosca was soon fol-lowed by hundreds more. People in the Ukraine may have bought it the first time for its attractive price, but they came back in droves for more because of its quality. Success in the Ukraine opened the gates to the huge Russian market, and the response there was instantaneous.

Even the importers stopped asking for spumante, and simply cried “Bosca.” In Kiev and in Poland, counterfeit bottles of Bosca be-gan to appear, just like the counterfeit Gucci bags in Hong Kong. While the profits were not very high, the other repercussions from this op-eration beyond the Iron Curtain, now fallen, proved immensely valuable for Bosca. The sales kept the production lines active while work con-tinued feverishly to create a truly new product in the research center of Boglietto.

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THE GATES OF THE BALTIC

Gintaras Skorupskas is a young Lithuanian physician in Kaunas, who had specialized in heart surgery at the University of Moscow. In 1991, the Russian army was forced out of Lithua-nia by popular unrest, and the country became independent. Skorupskas decided to quit medi-cine and try his luck in trade. He spoke Russian and English quite well, and knew that Lithua-nia’s geographic location makes it a natural crossroads for trade between Russia and the western world. He had noticed Bosca’s success in Russia and as soon as he had a chance, he went to Canelli and obtained an exclusive distri-bution agreement for the Baltic region. Here, the product was perhaps even more successful than it had been elsewhere. But Skorupskas was well aware of the danger that—after the initial period of regulatory anarchy caused by the transition from Communism to a free market—products such as alcoholic beverages might be subjected to heavy import barriers.

Luigiterzo Bosca had spoken to him of his project for the creation of joint ventures with ambitious partners who were willing to run risks and who wanted to create their own companies.

In 1997 at Kaunas, the Boslita ir Ko was founded, for the production of “Bosca” in Lithuania. The plant, built at record speed, went into operation at the beginning of 1998 despite the delays of the local bureaucracy. As of this writing, over 400,000

bottles are produced in Kaunas every month and

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The plant in Kaunas, Lithuania.

“Bosca” has quickly become the market leader. Moreover, an idea that at first seemed like nothing more than a theory—independence and innovative products as conditions for the success of family-run and -owned companies—had proven its soundness in the field.

In little more than a year, young entrepreneurs from various nations of eastern Europe flocked to Kaunas, attracted by the hope of imitating this success story back home. In markets such as Moldavia, Bosnia, Kazakhstan, and many repub-lics of the Russian Federation, spumante offers substantial opportunities for growth and devel-opment: a luxury good that is accessible to one and all, for just few rubles, it offers a chance to participate in a new prosperity long dreamed of, thus far in vain (at least for most people).

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THE MARRIAGE OF WINE AND GRAIN

Among the many ingredients used in the re-search done at the Boglietto laboratory, malt had actually made an appearance. It immediately be-came clear that the addition of duly fermented malt to moscato made it far more interesting to drink and, moreover, reduced its alcohol content.

The taste, however, remained less than satisfac-tory, while the technical problems of the blend delayed its industrial production. The solution was finally reached when the decision was made to add various grains to the malt in a ratio that was gradually calibrated until an exceptional spumante was developed.

The V.E.R.D.I. project was finally taking form, and it was decided in fact to call the new product, which corresponded to the initial laboratory pro-gram, Verdi (now the initials stood for “versatile, enchanting, revolutionary, daring, Italian”).

A new closure system was invented in order to underscore its absolute novelty. It features a polimeric matrix composite resealable cham-pagne cork with no need for a cage, that pre-serves the characteristics of the traditional cork, happily pops up when you open it, and the bottle can be resealed after every use in order to save its freshness and precious bubbles. Once a pro-duct exclusively dedicated to celebrations, spumante has now become part of our daily pleasures.

Once the product had been invented, it became necessary to invent the market. A shift in taste and

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Plant for the processing of grains.

Plant for the processing of wines at Boglietto di Costigliole d’Asti.

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fashion could not be imposed from on high, but would have to grow on a grassroots level, from widespread demand, despite the hesitation of im-porters and distributors, who thought Verdi was an excessively new product. Once again, Bosca turned to the United States where Steven Karp, a bright manager from New Jersey, an expert in the wine and alcohol business and a friend of the leading American distributors, wholeheartedly supported the idea of Verdi.

He had sensed the immense potential of the new beverage. But the initial launch ran into a cautious attitude on the part of consumers. An unexpected turn of events proved a piece of luck. New norms issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms required that certain modifications be made in the labels on the bottles of Verdi. To prevent confusion in the marketing effort, it was decided to suspend sales of the bottles with the old labels and to offer those still in stock to catering companies at a sharp discount. The catering com-panies began to serve Verdi by the glass at the banquets they catered. Success was immediate: people were drinking a spumante about which they knew nothing—neither name nor method of pro-duction—except that they were impressed with its enchanting taste. The caterers were immediately flooded with requests for information about the product and, for the first time in the history of the Bosca company, letters, faxes, and e-mails began to pour in to the distributors and directly to Canelli to ask where the new and mysterious spumante could be found. No advertising campaign could have achieved what the catering companies and an enthusiastic word-of-mouth did.

From that point on, sales skyrocketed, to the

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Steve Karp and Pia Bosca receiving the Hot Brand Award 2005 from Marvin Shanken.

point that Verdi attracted the attention of the entire industry in the States. In 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004, and 2005 Verdi was given the Hot Brands Award by the magazine Impact; the sole product having obtained such an award for six years. Karp was able to develop a company of his own, in collaboration with Bosca.

In Australia, Bosca Asti was distributed by Nino Molinari, a Tuscan from Lucca who had come to Sydney in the late Sixties and had established a food distribution business there, becoming over the years the most respected importer of Italian wines. Molinari showed absolutely no interest in Verdi. To someone like him, who had dedicated his life to the great wines of Italy, it seemed sacri-legious. Still, intrigued by the accounts of early

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success in America, or perhaps unwilling to of-fend the people from Bosca, who insisted on Verdi, enthusiastically and persistently, Nino Molinari agreed to accept delivery of a first container after establishing that Bosca would take it back if he was unable to sell. Result: in three years Verdi became one of the biggest-selling Italian products in Australia, to the point that there are some res-taurants that order it by the 20-foot container.

In England, Bosca had established a joint-ven-ture with two young men who had once worked for the Gallo group, Paul Burton and John Hibberd, who had suggested to the Canelli-based company that they set up business on their own in the United Kingdom. It was an adventure that led to success, and the credit went entirely to determination and good luck. In fact, it was no easier in England than elsewhere to undertake the distribution of a new product such as Verdi, in a market where distribu-tion was almost entirely controlled by huge or-ganizations that were reluctant to take risks on new ideas, even if the public was demanding them. A situation that nothing daunted the new distribu-tors of Bosca products. Verdi, marketed in the United Kingdom as a beverage with a new taste, sold over eighty thousand cases a year.

Thanks to bright and visionary men Verdi is today distributed in several markets and its diffusions is constantly expanding. Hans Ulrik Andersen in Denmark, Ariel Epstein in Israel, Tarcisio Piscopo in tiny Malta and many others from the Caribbean to Vietnam, from the Baltic to Mauritius, from China to Hungary, from Iceland to Russia to the Czech Republic…are the men to whom we owe the rise of a new cult.

In Canelli, Verdi was at first produced in a small

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A river of bottles flowing towards the Verdi.

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experimental plant, located in an industrial shed, little more than a space with jury-rigged machinery.

At the beginning of 1999, alongside the old Cora plant in Boglietto, a radically new factory was built, the first on earth to make use of the tech-nology developed by Bosca. The plant is capable of producing, bottling, and packaging up to 35

million bottles a year. A record, but also a bet on the future because volumes of production on such levels have never been achieved by any company in Canelli. Whether the new spumante in its in-novated “grain-based beverage” format would succeed in restoring the town to its dominance of the spumante market remains, of course, an open question. What seems clear, all the same, is that it is a sound idea to conceive of spumante as a beverage. At the same time, it is equally clear that the strategy pursued by the company has been a good one: it is necessary to come up with new ideas from tradition in order to adapt to the future.

In this connection, we should quote a few pas-sages from the report of the Bosca Board of Direc-tors for 1996, which set forth for the first time to the shareholders the company’s new strategy.

“The decision we made a few years ago to transform this company into a structure dedicated to research and innovation seems to be giving its first concrete results. We shall not describe the series of factors that led us to make this difficult but inevitable decision, but we should point out that the great structural changes that occured between the late Eighties and the early Nineties swept through our industry on a global scale, and placed us face-to-face with a clear alternative: give up the compa-ny’s independence, probably merging with one of the major groups that dominate the world market, if this

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Production line for Verdi.

were still possible at acceptable terms, or else transform the company into a hotbed of new ideas capable of creating new markets by their innovative content, thereby offering new spaces for this company.”

Without, of course, any illusions concerning the capacity of a local company to reverse a larger, more general process, the executives of the Bosca company saw Canelli as a microcosm of a larger trend throughout Italy. This trend mirrored the analysis offered by one of the leading modern historians of economics, Carlo M. Cipolla, con-cerning the causes that had triggered the economic decline of Italian cities, which had been Europe’s most thriving cities up until the seventeenth cen-tury: non-competitive goods and services, produc-tion of luxury products that were no longer fash-

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Advertisement for Verdi.

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ionable, conservatism of guilds and other associa-tions and hostility towards necessary technologi-cal changes. The ownership and management of the Bosca company saw in this analysis a precise description of the development of Italian enology over the previous quarter century.

The decision to transform the company from a producer of wines into an innovative research unit, then, appeared justified not only by a local eco-nomic micro-analysis but also by a macroeco-nomic vision of the situation in the wine-making industry, a situation which eventually was bound to take the spumante of Canelli as a victim.

We read again in the shareholders’ report:

“In the process of globalization there is less and less space for the initiative of individual entrepreneurs, overwhelmed at every turn. But inventivity, creativity, personal vision, and far-sightedness cannot be re-pressed. If the development of the world of manufac-turing continues in its current direction, the day will come when it becomes clear that it is absolutely neces-sary to have vision, to strive for solutions, to ignore the opinions of experts, and to have the simple courage to try new things”.

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The Pyramid of Dreams.

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THE SPUMANTEOF THE GREAT CATHEDRAL

Miles of cellars, mainly abandoned or forgotten, carve out the undergrounds of Canelli and freshly cherish heirlooms of stories of hard work, glories and defeats. Many wine companies between the end of the eighteen hundreds and the beginning of the nineteen hundreds have made these places the heart of their operations. Four of the historical wine cellars, known since the dawn of Canelli’s glorious days as the “Underground Cathedrals”, are still active today and they are places of transcendental architectural beauty. They are enchanting monuments so much full of memories and traditions that UNESCO felt the moral obligation to include them in the international protection program awaiting to proclaim them World Human Heritage.

We are talking about the Contratto, Coppo, Gancia and Bosca cellars. The latter may brag about two significant records: antiquity and size. Construction of the Bosca cellars began about two decades sooner than the others in the 30’s of the nineteenth century and upon an underground surface of ... squared meters rise rows of large, harmonious and overshadowing vaults, known as the “Great Cathedral” of Canelli.

The Great Cathedral is the grand and brave tangible accomplishment of the first Luigi who had the vision and ability to transform two tiny cellars inherited from his father into what would have become the monument to the creativity and tenacity of a brilliant entrepreneur. In the time between one business trip and the other the world over, Luigi

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would passionately dedicate himself to developing new techniques and recipes. Those were the pioneering times of a process of continuous evolution in search of an ever-growing quality.

During one of his journeys to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean Luigi discovered that the Rum from Martinique was distilled from pure sugarcane juice. He wittingly realized that such a spirit would be a great substitute for Brandy in the preparation of the liqueur, a final phase add-in of spumante that gives it its particular aroma. While at home his attentive tours in the vineyards helped his intuition again. Using honey produced in his Monteriolo estate as a substitute for sugar in the production of the top-of-the-line spumante.

The use of honey in place of sugar and Rum in place of Brandy was the little yet extraordinary intuition of Luigi. Such a breakthrough, though, was not compatible with mass production constraints that would have characterized the years to come. The compelling thought of an oddball genius, not quite in line with the rational industrial procedures, was temporarily put aside. On the contrary, the love for cleverness and the continuous attention to research was never put aside in the company.

By the end of the 1980’s the market was becoming ever more demanding about the quality and appeal of the products it was willing to consume. At that time Bosca launched a thorough research project in association with the Asti Institute of Experimental Oenology led by its bright director, Professor Luciano Usseglio Tommaset. The goal was to determine on one side which varieties of grapes from the Asti area would be the most appropriate in order to produce a premium quality spumante and, on the other side, how and with what proportions the

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different types of grapes should ultimately be blended. Researchers came up with the ideal mix made of a minor percentage of barbera together with pinot noir and chardonnay grown in Moirano, a large estate located in the southern part of the Asti province.

Research in the wine industry requires a lot of patience and lengthy periods of time and this brings us to the beginning of the current century when the eccentric recipes invented by the first Luigi were also retrieved. Rum and honey added – more out of curiosity rather than out of determination – to an accurately selected blend of different wines generated a phenomenal result, a “unicum” of the highest quality.

The “Spumante of the Great Cathedral” wasreborn.

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Spumante of the Great Cathedral.

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NOBLESSE OBLIGE

Having reached this point in our history of a company that is not atypical in the current land-scape of the Italian economy, we may well won-der whether there exists a cultural context in which to place this manner of corporate behavior, which we might describe as a kind of family-corporate innovative process.

Since the devastating floods of 1948 and 1994

entirely destroyed the company’s archives, as we have mentioned, we are unable to offer a “his-toric” response to this question. Still, something can be discerned from the way that the present company leadership has reacted to the fact that Bosca has remained one of the very few—in Italy and Europe—of the great, “historic” com-panies to survive, under the control of the origi-nal founding family.

This situation may have inspired the compa-ny’s innovative approach, but it also shaped its view of commitments outside of the realm of business. Because of its long history, the Bosca company has become a point of confluence among the several generations of the town of Canelli. Most of the town’s inhabitants have had relationships of some sort—work, friendship, in-terests, or education—with the company. And so it was natural that the Foresteria Bosca, once a complex of buildings that served at once as fac-tory, residence, and cellars, should be trans-formed into a civic center, where old and new generations gathered and interacted.

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The art gallery in the cellars.

The Foresteria nowadays serves as a confer-ence center, an art museum, a venue for private and public events of all sorts, managed by the Luigi Bosca Center for Culture and the Arts, under the supervision of Arabella Bosca. The Center works to encourage the culture of wine, through the interaction of various forms of knowledge and disciplines, in an understated manner as is traditional in Piedmont. In conjunc-tion there is a publishing house, which creates small books that treat local history and art. The old plant adjacent to the Foresteria has been pre-served in the precise state in which it stopped production, in 1961: more than a simple museum of enology, it is a monument to the history of spumante. In the cellars, the largest ones in Italy, spumante is still made with the same methods used by the first Luigi Bosca: it is not a business but a way of commemorating and handing down a tradition.

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Thousands of visitors tour the Foresteria every year: celebrities take part in the cultural events; foreign tourists come to Canelli, attracted by the allure of two centuries of history; idlers and kids from the local schools and colleges have taken to using it as a gathering spot.

Physically distant from Canelli, but close in thought and activity, the Bosca family pursues activities that have little to do with spumante, save for the bubbly sense of adventure.

The traditional family passion for horses was inherited by Edoardo Bosca, general manager of the company who developed the Allevamento Bosca (or Bosca Stables) at Castelnuovo Calcea and has shown the family flag, as it were, on various turfs and at various meets. Edoardo Bosca is also an enologist, and for many years was deeply involved in the technical side of the company’s operations. In the Eighties he created a first aid dispensary for the local population at Nangan Tuti, on the coast of Senegal.

Luigiterzo Bosca, currently president of the company, created the Bosca Foundation in Swit-zerland; this foundation is responsible, among other things, for financing the Institute for Medi-terranean Studies at the University of Italian-Speaking Switzerland in Lugano. First of the centers for advanced studies in this recently founded university—the only Italian-language university outside of Italy proper—the Institute for Mediterranean Studies is devoted to the study of cultural, artistic, political, and religious meth-odologies that can foster understanding and peaceful coexistence among the peoples of the Mediterranean, with a special focus on the Mideast.

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Palazzo Bosca.

If the industrial philosophy of the Bosca com-pany is “what works is already obsolete,” the social philosophy of the Bosca family is “we must pay back to society at least some portion of what society has given us.” The moscato spumante that made the fortune of Canelli over the course of the centuries has become, through civic commitment, the safest warranty of the Bosca dedication to those ideals.

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Finito di stampare nel Maggio 20006 per conto del Centro per la Cultura e l’Arte Luigi Bosca - Canelli (AT)

presso la Litografia FABIANO - Canelli (AT)

seconda edizione

Pri nted in Italy

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... thousands, millions of individuals work,produce, and save despite everything wecan dream up to annoy them, hinder them,and discourage them. It is a natural vocationthat impels; something more than a desirefor money. The joy, the pride of seeing one’scompany prosper, gaining credibility,winning the trust of larger and larger markets,enlarging plants and factories, improvingthe offices: all these things are as powerfula force for progress as mere profit. If thiswere not the case, then we would have noway of explaining why businessmen devoteall their energy to and invest all their capitalin companies that often yield smaller profitsthan could easily be had elsewhere.

Luigi Einaudi

1