Research, Innovation and Harbingers of a revolutionary new Idea

If this policy of joint ventures—which had yielded excellent results with Canei—were to continue, however, it was necessary to invent a new product to share financially with new (or old) distributors. The answer could only be found outside of the Bosca company and the general field of wine-making. It was necessary to join experience and tradition with the new solutions offered by science and technology. The links with the past were maintained by continuing the production of high-quality spumante and vermouth and DOC wines in directly owned vineyards. The links with the future, on the other hand, were established by the judicious application of science and technology in a quest for a new product.

The hillside witn the collection In Canelli there has been—and still exists—a collection of species of grapes, unlike anything else on earth, that contains in a single area over 100 species of moscato of diverse origins. It was created to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Bosca company (1831-1981); the idea was developed by Professor Italo Eynard, who held the chair in viticulture at the department of agrarian studies at the University of Turin. The undertaking received the cooperation of scientific institutions in nearly all of the countries with an ancient tradition of growing grapes—France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, the Ukraine, and Armenia—and countries with a more recent history of viticulture, such as South Africa, North and South America, and Australia. The ultimate result of the work being done on this collection of species has been the classification of the DNA of the diverse varieties of moscato. The collection offers grape-growers around the world ways to improve the quality of their moscato. In 1989, when Luigiterzo Bosca decided, just when Canei was at the peak of its immense commercial success, to sell it, all of this lay in the future. There was a collection of species of grapes, but no one knew quite what to do with it; there was money to invest in the wake of the sale of the Canei brand, but there were no ideas about how to spend that money. At the Bosca company it was generally thought that the first step to take was to engage in a radical transformation of moscato from wine into a beverage. This led to the development of the V.E.R.D.I. project. The initials stood for words that indicated the hope of finding—discovering or inventing—something that would be a “versatile, enchanting, revolutionary, daring innovation”. Fine words that outlined an idea that, in and of itself, was in no way revolutionary; it was simply the challenge of achieving, in the industry of spumante, one of those dreams that had made the fortune of other Italian manufacturers: Ferrero with Nutella, Gallo with its rice, and Piaggio with the Vespa.
Over the five years that followed, it was decisive for the Bosca company to deploy executives and manpower on a project based on the principle that “what works is already obsolete”. In this specific case, following the voluntary abandonment of Canei at the very peak of its success, it became necessary to undertake a conversion of concepts and ways of operating. The goal was attained with a shift in production and investment strategy: transform a winery into a research laboratory, linking the production of the future to innovation instead of exploitation of tradition.
The years between 1989 and 1995 were particularly difficult. At the Bosca company, in what is now jocularly referred to as the “skeleton closet”, dozens and dozens of bottles accumulated, with every imaginable shape and content, evidence of countless unsuccessful attempts to invent a new and convincing product with which to relaunch the company.
Then someone thought of vermouth. Vermouth had been one of the great industrial products of the nineteenth century, and had created enormous companies that made Piedmont the wine-industry capital of the time. Martini and Cinzano were names to conjure with, as famous in their time as Benetton and Microsoft are today. Suffice it to consider that there was a point at which Martini & Rossi's advertising budget was larger than Coca-Cola's.
The success of these brands did not derive only from the quality of the grapes, but also by the brilliance of manufacturers capable of capitalizing on a good raw material and creating an “artificial” product (the word artificial is often considered blasphemous but is actually the key to many industrial success stories) that could fulfill a need, perhaps a subconscious need, on the part of the consumer. In the case of vermouth, the artifice was to transform natural products—grapes, aromatic herbs, beets, wheat—into, first and respectively, wine, essences, sugar, and alcohol, and then, with painstaking blending, into a delightful product that, oddly enough, became famous with a German name (Wermut), written in the French style (vermouth).
There is a strange reaction found among many wine makers to the success of “artificial” products in the industry. Even in the sector of aperitifs and liquors, these entrepreneurs continue to vaunt the naturalness of their wines, including their “genuine” spumante, even though it remains an “artificial” industrial product. After all, spumante is a blend, though ennobled by the name of “cuvée”, “carefully spiked” with wine, sugar, and yeasts, along with an injection of various distillates. Even today we call them, “exotically”, la liqueur, in tribute to the secret of the formula, jealously protected and concealed by the original producers. Perhaps the reluctance of vintners toward innovation is the product of habits crystalized by the prestige of tradition, preventing imaginative leaps that—on the other hand—have made possible both vermouth and, in Bosca's case, Verdi.
It was, in any case, with a view to vermouth that the company's research efforts were directed in 1989 toward a program to pursue new developments in the blending of spumante with other alimentary substances.
Two men were leading this race against time and against the rapidly depleting resources that the Bosca family had devoted to this challenge: Vittorio Landi and Carlo Aliberti.

Carlo Aliberti, Luigiterzo Bosca and Vittorio Landi Vittorio Landi, managing director of the Bosca company, is a Genoa-born accountant who came up through the engineering industry. By an odd coincidence, when he was 19 his very first job had been with a distributor of Bosca products in Genoa. Then he had founded a company of his own and had gone on to sell it, and was now looking for a position of authority in a company open to innovation.
Aliberti was a young man, 25, the son of an old farming family. He had studied enology and had taken a degree in chemistry; but he continued to help his father grow grapes on his days off. The Bosca company had noticed him almost by chance, through a classified advertisement that his friends had placed to congratulate him for his brilliant success on his final graduate exams, published in a local newspaper. The president of the Bosca company, Luigiterzo, felt certain that what was needed for the invention of new products was a talented and reliable technician, with a good understanding and appreciation of wine, but above all a man who might be open to experimentation. Someone deeply steeped in the culture of wine and vineyards, but sensitive to the demands of the marketplace; someone who could appreciate the prestige of a wine without being psychologically conditioned by the traditions that went with that prestige. As of this writing, Aliberti is the director of the plant at Costigliole d'Asti, proud inventor of a product that marked a new twist in the history of Canelli and of Italian spumante.

HARBINGERS OF A REVOLUTIONARY NEW IDEA

If East Germany had been a providential windfall for Canei, Russia, fresh from the miracle of perestroika, would serve the same role for the new directions at the Bosca company.
The Bosca name had been familiar in Russia as far back as the nineteenth century, when the first Luigi Bosca first began to export his spumante there. In the Soviet Union the Bosca presence dates back to the first contacts made through the branch office of Vienna: an Austrian adventure, as explained above, that proved a total failure in purely commercial terms but a true blessing over the long term.
Beginning in 1991, the borders of the former Soviet Union had opened wide and chaotically to imports from the West on two conditions: that these imports convey a “capitalist” image and that they be available at “rock-bottom” prices. Spumante, along with perfume, jeans, McDonald's fast food, and thousands of other articles of apparent or claimed nouveau luxe, was what a myriad of new Russian importers, suddenly flush with cash and scarcely familiar with the ways of business, were seeking on Western markets.
The Bosca company was not interested in this sort of demand, which demeaned its dedication to quality. For more than a year, there was an exchange of requests and refusals between Bosca and Russian importers. The importers were interested in price; Bosca wanted a chance to test at least one of the products that were slowly emerging from its research on this new market. It was a rare opportunity in a moment that was unique, both politically and commercially.
Finally, a young Jewish businessman from Odessa who had recently moved to the United States agreed. He had made a considerable fortune with the coffee he packaged in New Jersey and shipped to the Ukraine. He agreed to acquire the new Bosca product; what he liked about it was the bouquet and the taste; it was not a wine but a beverage that may have been made with wine but with other ingredients as well. He did not mind the fact that it was only 14 proof, or 7 percent alcohol, nor that it was sold not as spumante but simply as “Bosca”.
The first container full of Bosca was soon followed by hundreds more. People in the Ukraine may have bought it the first time for its attractive price, but they came back in droves for more because of its quality. Success in the Ukraine opened the gates to the huge Russian market, and the response there was instantaneous.
Even the importers stopped asking for spumante, and simply cried “Bosca.” In Kiev and in Poland, counterfeit bottles of Bosca began to appear, just like the counterfeit Gucci bags in Hong Kong. While the profits were not very high, the other repercussions from this operation beyond the Iron Curtain, now fallen, proved immensely valuable for Bosca. The sales kept the production lines active while work continued feverishly to create a truly new product in the research center of Boglietto.

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