Using the Past to invent the Future

Headquarters of Bosca in Canelli 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 generations 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 operations.
This was, perhaps, a sign of excessive optimism 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 constituted an integral part of the daily fare. Wine was turning, in general, into a refined luxury commodity. A myriad of talented small-scale entrepreneurs, attracted by the potential of this new and expanding market, set up new wineries, and many of those quickly won international success. There was a trend toward wines with DOC 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 obtained 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 industrial production of spumante does not allow for such refinements, which for that matter are difficult to perceive in a product of this sort.
Angelo Riccadonna was the only industrialist in the sector who understood the need for a profound renovation of the spumante industry, in spite of the obstacles that tradition and entrepreneurial 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 production of vermouth and seemed to have no interest in entering the spumante market, Riccadonna understood the importance of what we might call a well-targeted image of novelty. His 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 industry 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 experts, 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 increasing 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 in the Seventies and Eighties had in some sense prevented them from foreseeing this development, 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 company with leadership in the Asti industry, capable 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 understanding of the paradox of an expanding production that was merely hastening the company's demise. A tentative suggestion that collaboration amongst the big corporations might be an option, made by Luigiterzo in the early Seventies, triggered outrage and was quickly abandoned. 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 crushing 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 considerable 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 indispensable virtues, but they are not enough to make profound economic and technological transformations occur. The human factor of leadership is 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 companies, 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 totally 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 rival, 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 company. In the search for a new product, with all the apprehension that that involved, someone remembered the old idea, born and laid to rest years ago at Mons in Belgium, whereby an unsuccessful 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.

Canei That certain someone was the enologist Francesco Paschina, who had the brilliant idea of 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 manufacturing concepts; the vision of that talented technician 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 appreciated by a far broader public than the usual consumers. 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 refermentation. 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 wine into a beverage, lost over the centuries in the welter of changes in taste and economy.
At first Canei met with opposition from experts and connoisseurs who often thought of themselves as high priests of traditional wine-making. Canei was angrily, and enviously, criticized 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 perceived 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 market undergoing radical transformation, but also a new way of conceiving of demand from consumers who wanted a different approach from that of the classic vintner.
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 appearance, this package soon proved to be a major factor in its success, an inadvertent stroke of genius. In fact, the Canei bottle could not fit in normal 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 traditional 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 immediately greeted with enthusiasm by the retailers. Once again, however, it became clear that strategies 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 natural safe target for the promotion of Canei. Instead, success came rolling in from the opposite direction, from a source that no one could possibly have imagined, both for economic and ideological 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 preservation of power was a basic reason for survival, bureaucratic inertia was a typical and widespread factor. The officials who had wrestled a decade previous with the serious political problems involved in importing a few thousand bottles of capitalist Bosca spumante were the same ones who now faced the daunting political and ideological issues raised by the entry of Canei into the world of German Marxism. This time, however, 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 currency, the ideological puritanism, and the Teutonic pride of the Soviet bloc's economic powerhouse 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 beyond the Iron Curtain. Italy—which had the largest Communist party in Europe—and its foreign policy that was endlessly beckoning to Eastern Europe did not scare the German bureaucrats; Canei itself blended the taste of wine with the thrill of sinful bourgeois luxury; and so the authorities 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 “voluptuous” glass recipients, with elegantly elongated 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 necessary to build a new plant to meet demand. Gino Robba, the owner of one of the largest manufacturers 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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