Noblesse oblige

Having reached this point in our history of a company that is not atypical in the current landscape of the Italian economy, we may well wonder whether there exists a cultural context in which to place this manner of corporate behavior, which we might describe as a kind of family-corporate innovative process.
Since the devastating floods of 1948 and 1994 entirely destroyed the company's archives, as we have mentioned, we are unable to offer a "historic" response to this question. Still, something can be discerned from the way that the present company leadership has reacted to the fact that Bosca has remained one of the very few—in Italy and Europe—of the great, "historic" companies to survive, under the control of the original founding family.
This situation may have inspired the company's innovative approach, but it also shaped its view of commitments outside of the realm of business. Because of its long history, the Bosca company has become a point of confluence among the several generations of the town of Canelli. Most of the town's inhabitants have had relationships of some sort—work, friendship, interests, or education—with the company. And so it was natural that the Foresteria Bosca, once a complex of buildings that served at once as factory, residence, and cellars, should be transformed into a civic center, where old and new generations gathered and interacted.
The Foresteria nowadays serves as a conference center, an art museum, a venue for private and public events of all sorts, managed by the Luigi Bosca Center for Culture and the Arts, under the supervision of Arabella Bosca. The Center works to encourage the culture of wine, through the interaction of various forms of knowledge and disciplines, in an understated manner as is traditional in Piedmont. In conjunction there is a publishing house, which creates small books that treat local history and art. The old plant adjacent to the Foresteria has been preserved in the precise state in which it stopped production, in 1961: more than a simple museum of enology, it is a monument to the history of spumante. In the cellars, the largest ones in Italy, spumante is still made with the same methods used by the first Luigi Bosca: it is not a business but a way of commemorating and handing down a tradition.

Art Gallery in the Cellars Thousands of visitors tour the Foresteria every year: celebrities take part in the cultural events; foreign tourists come to Canelli, attracted by the allure of two centuries of history; idlers and kids from the local schools and colleges have taken to using it as a gathering spot.
Physically distant from Canelli, but close in thought and activity, the Bosca family pursues activities that have little to do with spumante, save for the bubbly sense of adventure.
The traditional family passion for horses was inherited by Edoardo Bosca, general manager of the company who developed the Allevamento Bosca (or Bosca Stables) at Castelnuovo Calcea and has shown the family flag, as it were, on various turfs and at various meets. Edoardo Bosca is also an enologist, and for many years was deeply involved in the technical side of the company's operations. In the Eighties he created a first aid dispensary for the local population at Nangan Tuti, on the coast of Senegal.
Luigiterzo Bosca, currently president of the company, created the Bosca Foundation in Switzerland; this foundation is responsible, among other things, for financing the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at the University of Italian-Speaking Switzerland in Lugano. First of the centers for advanced studies in this recently founded university—the only Italian-language university outside of Italy proper—the Institute for Mediterranean Studies is devoted to the study of cultural, artistic, political, and religious methodologies that can foster understanding and peaceful coexistence among the peoples of the Mediterranean, with a special focus on the Mideast.
If the industrial philosophy of the Bosca company is "what works is already obsolete," the social philosophy of the Bosca family is "we must pay back to society at least some portion of what society has given us." The moscato spumante that made the fortune of Canelli over the course of the centuries has become, through civic commitment, the safest warranty of the Bosca dedication to those ideals.

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