The Marriage of Wine and Grain

Among the many ingredients used in the research done at the Boglietto laboratory, beer had actually made an appearance. It immediately became clear that the addition of beer to moscato made it far more interesting to drink and, moreover, reduced its alcohol content.
The taste, however, remained less than satisfactory, while the technical problems of the blend delayed its industrial production. The solution was finally reached when the decision was made to add various grains to the malt in a ratio that was gradually calibrated until an exceptional product was developed.
The V.E.R.D.I. project was finally taking form, and it was decided in fact to call the new product, which corresponded to the initial laboratory program, Verdi (now the initials stood for “versatile, enchanting, revolutionary, daring, Italian”).
Once the product had been invented, it became necessary to invent the market. A shift in taste and fashion could not be imposed from on high, but would have to grow on a grassroots level, from widespread demand, despite the hesitation of importers and distributors, who thought Verdi was an excessively new product. Once again, Bosca turned to the United States where Steven Karp, a bright manager from New Jersey, an expert in the wine and alcohol business and a friend of the leading American distributors, wholeheartedly supported the idea of Verdi.
He had sensed the immense potential of the new beverage. But the initial launch ran into a cautious attitude on the part of consumers. An unexpected turn of events proved a piece of luck. New norms issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms required that certain modifications be made in the labels on the bottles of Verdi. To prevent confusion in the marketing effort, it was decided to suspend sales of the bottles with the old labels and to offer those still in stock to catering companies at a sharp discount. The catering companies began to serve Verdi by the glass at the banquets they catered. Success was immediate: people were drinking a product about which they knew nothing—neither name nor method of production—except that they were impressed with its enchanting taste. The caterers were immediately flooded with requests for information about the product and, for the first time in the history of the Bosca company, letters, faxes, and e-mails began to pour in to the distributors and directly to Canelli to ask where the new and mysterious beverage could be found. No advertising campaign could have achieved what the catering companies and an enthusiastic word-of-mouth did.
From that point on, sales skyrocketed, to the point that Verdi attracted the attention of the entire industry in the States. In 1997 and 1998 Verdi was given the Hot Brands Award by the magazine Impact; Karp was able to develop a company of his own, in collaboration with Bosca.
In Australia, Bosca Asti was distributed by Nino Molinari, a Tuscan from Lucca who had come to Sydney in the late Sixties and had established a food distribution business there, becoming over the years the most respected importer of Italian wines. Molinari showed absolutely no interest in Verdi. To someone like him, who had dedicated his life to the great wines of Italy, it seemed sacrilegious. Still, intrigued by the accounts of early success in America, or perhaps unwilling to offend the people from Bosca, who insisted on Verdi, enthusiastically and persistently, Nino Molinari agreed to accept delivery of a first container after establishing that Bosca would take it back if he was unable to sell. Result: in three years Verdi became one of the biggest-selling Italian products in Australia, to the point that there are some restaurants that order it by the 20-foot container.
In England, Bosca had established a joint-venture with two young men who had once worked for the Gallo group who had suggested to the Canelli-based company that they set up business on their own in the United Kingdom. It was an adventure that led to success, and the credit went entirely to determination and good luck. In fact, it was no easier in England than elsewhere to undertake the distribution of a new product such as Verdi, in a market where distribution was almost entirely controlled by huge organizations that were reluctant to take risks on new ideas, even if the public was demanding them. A situation that nothing daunted the new distributors of Bosca products. Verdi, marketed in the United Kingdom as a beverage with a new taste, sold over eighty thousand cases a year.
In Canelli, Verdi was at first produced in a small experimental plant, located in an industrial shed, little more than a space with jury-rigged machinery.
At the beginning of 1999, alongside the old Cora plant in Boglietto, a radically new factory was built, the first on earth to make use of the technology developed by Bosca. The plant is capable of producing, bottling, and packaging up to 35 million bottles a year. A record, but also a bet on the future because volumes of production on such levels have never been achieved by any company in Canelli. Whether the new drink in its innovated “grain-based beverage” format would succeed in restoring the town to its dominance of the market remains, of course, an open question. What seems clear, all the same, is that it is a sound idea to conceive of such product as a beverage. At the same time, it is equally clear that the strategy pursued by the company has been a good one: it is necessary to come up with new ideas from tradition in order to adapt to the future.
In this connection, we should quote a few passages from the report of the Bosca Board of Directors for 1996, which set forth for the first time to the shareholders the company's new strategy.

“The decision we made a few years ago to transform this company into a structure dedicated to research and innovation seems to be giving its first concrete results. We shall not describe the series of factors that led us to make this difficult but inevitable decision, but we should point out that the great structural changes that occured between the late Eighties and the early Nineties swept through our industry on a global scale, and placed us face-to-face with a clear alternative: give up the company's independence, probably merging with one of the major groups that dominate the world market, if this were still possible at acceptable terms, or else transform the company into a hotbed of new ideas capable of creating new markets by their innovative content, thereby offering new spaces for this company.”

Without, of course, any illusions concerning the capacity of a local company to reverse a larger, more general process, the executives of the Bosca company saw Canelli as a microcosm of a larger trend throughout Italy. This trend mirrored the analysis offered by one of the leading modern historians of economics, Carlo M. Cipolla, concerning the causes that had triggered the economic decline of Italian cities, which had been Europe's most thriving cities up until the seventeenth century: non-competitive goods and services, production of luxury products that were no longer fashionable, conservatism of guilds and other associations and hostility towards necessary technological changes. The ownership and management of the Bosca company saw in this analysis a precise description of the development of Italian enology over the previous quarter century.
The decision to transform the company from a producer of wines into an innovative research unit, then, appeared justified not only by a local economic micro-analysis but also by a macroeconomic vision of the situation in the wine-making industry, a situation which eventually was bound to take the industry of Canelli as a victim.
We read again in the shareholders' report:

“In the process of globalization there is less and less space for the initiative of individual entrepreneurs, overwhelmed at every turn. But inventivity, creativity, personal vision, and far-sightedness cannot be repressed. If the development of the world of manufacturing continues in its current direction, the day will come when it becomes clear that it is absolutely necessary to have vision, to strive for solutions, to ignore the opinions of experts, and to have the simple courage to try new things”.

Top | Five Star Asti