The Bosca Family and the Wine of Canelli

Pietro Bosca (1799-1887) Here too, the connection is an ancient one. Pietro Bosca, the son of Secondo and Domenica Scaglione, and the first member of the Bosca family about whom we have documentary information, 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 offered “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 without 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 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 apparently 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 partisan fighters of the time. The worst memory that farmers like Bosca had of the passage of the Napoleonic 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 memories 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 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, famines, and revolutionary disorders, when the collapse of prices was compounded by the incompetence 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 economic horizons without demanding excessive investments. The creation of a company seemed obligatory: it expanded his physical role from that of land-owner to a legal role as entrepreneur and merchant; it confirmed his transition from the peasantry 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 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 development of the aspirations of an emergent class, determined to adapt to the political and economic changes of its times. For the Bosca family, commercial 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 government 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 married Margherita Cortese, who eventually gave him 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 company's progress, sending him regular reports on the back of post cards that she mailed to the various 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 grapevines, 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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