From Industrialist to Farmer

In the meanwhile, Italy was undergoing the largest and most peaceful agrarian land reform in its history, with the suppression of sharecropping through all sorts of state assistance offered to peasants to buy land that the large estate holders 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, unpredictable. They generally bought grapes from farmers or else they bought wine produced by cooperative wineries. Luigi Bosca saw, however, an opportunity 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, making 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 traditional 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 operable on steep slopes which always produce the finest quality grapes—to reduce costs and labor drastically. This was a simple technical innovation, 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 Piedmont. 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 flocking to the city to work in factories.

Map of the Tenute Luigi IV 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 In these vineyards, the traditional farmer had been replaced by farmworkers transported from Canelli each day to work the vineyards.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 commercial and industrial activities in which his family had distinguished itself for so many generations, was perhaps prompted by a foreshadowing of the illness that was to strike him in 1974. It pushed him to hand over the management 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 personality 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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