From a National Company to 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 University of Turin, he found himself obliged to take over the family company. Once the issues of inheritance 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 enlargement 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 occupation (1943-45). Piedmont was torn by civil war between partisan fighters and diehard Repubblichini, 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 headlong into the efforts to rebuild. He was convinced that the company had the resources to undertake the old strategy of “purveyor to émigrés”, while expanding the company's activities abroad. Mindful 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 exporting wine directly from Italy. If the company was to have any hope of survival, it meant transferring 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 advantage of the prestige that the family name still commanded. 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 Europe and India. They were not all successful, but they did all contribute to the creation of a leadership image for Bosca in the spumante industry.

The plant for Vini Bée, Stabio, Switzerland In the years following the Second World War, Switzerland had the highest number of Italian émigrés. In 1955, Luigi Bosca purchased a company 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 geographically 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 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 creation 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, 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 decades—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 spectacularly 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 unexpected result for the Bosca company took place in Vienna, the traditional launching ground for trade with eastern Europe. There were few Italians in Austria in the period immediately following the Second World War, and commercial exchanges 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 consisted 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 nations: 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 returns of Bosca Austria were nonetheless so disappointing that after ten years or so, the subsidiary was shut down. Its operations, all the same, had made the Bosca name familiar in many Communist countries, where any western product at all that appeared in the drab and dingy shop windows of eastern Europe immediately attracted notice and impressed the public deeply. The Austrian “springboard” also helped to establish relationships with the various government organizations that oversaw the import of luxury goods, and to learn to understand their workings and mentality. This experience, though it was minimized in Canelli in the Sixties, proved to be invaluable in later years when Communist eastern Europe began to develop a slowly improving standard of living, and thus began to open its doors to goods other than basic commodities. The Bosca company thus found itself, miraculously, 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 textbook 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 religious law. Cacciandra, a former general in the Italian cavalry, was a champion show-rider, and an old friend of Luigi, with whom he shared a great love for horses. Cacciandra was also 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. On the other hand, the Deccan highland produced excellent table grapes but the local market, following the departure of the English (who had once had their largest military base in Puna), could no longer absorb this produce.
Cacciandra, contacted by the local administration with a view to finding an outlet for this excess grape production, thought that he could solve the problem by manufacturing nonalcoholic grape juice. He consulted with Luigi, who could hardly believe his luck at undertaking a project that had all the elements, both economic and psychological, 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. Nowadays in Deccan, in the region of Baramati, lush vineyards planted by the Bosca company with Italian species of grapes—Barbera, Nebbiolo, Riesling, Moscato, Chardonnay, Trebbiano, and Grignolino—provide grapes for the Baramati Grape Industries, for the production of Bosca wines and vermouth.

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