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 working 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 alcoholic beverage: it was a “nectar” that reminded them of their homeland on special occasions and holidays, and of their own home on family occasions; something to toast with for successes in business or when someone returned from a long trip, or from a war; something to sweeten farewells 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 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 crossings. 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 because 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 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 ravaged 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 advertised, among other things, postal service between 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 arrival 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 troubles, 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 celebrate 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 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 decorations, 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 important wineries of the time. Located in the center 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 husband'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 numerous crises that hit the Italian wine industry in 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 foundation of the Consortium for the protection of Asti, of which Bosca is still a member.
At nearly sixty years of age he decided to “abdicate”. 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 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 became 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 survive, even in times that had seen the collapse and bankruptcy of so many glorious and venerable 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 herself, overseeing the public relations and promotional activities of a constantly growing company. Luigi died a venerable old man, after radically 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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