What happens when you lose all of your customers at once?
In 1978, that’s exactly what happened to Garbellotto S.p.A., one of Italy’s oldest and most celebrated barrel-makers. Founded in 1775 and still run by the same family today, it had once supplied barrels to the House of Habsburg. By the 20th century, the company’s vessels aged wine and spirits for some of Italy’s most storied producers, from Biondi Santi to Vecchia Romagna. Their craftsmanship had earned them a reputation in the industry as the Rolls-Royce of barrels.
And yet, none of it mattered in 1978. The oil shock of the 1970s froze long-term capital investment across Europe. For wineries, barrels were among the first expenditures to cut because they are expensive and slow to pay off. At the same time, consumer tastes had shifted from aged wines to younger, lighter varietals, rendering Garbellotto’s barrel-aging style almost irrelevant. Meanwhile, a parade of cheaper materials, from cement to stainless steel, flooded the cellars of the continent, displacing wood entirely.
One by one, the small cooperages of Italy shuttered. The ancient craft of the bottaio, the master cooper, was vanishing from the earth.
Commander Pietro Garbellotto, the seventh-generation patriarch, faced a decision that most business owners today would consider straightforward. Close the factory and lay off the workers. In a word: Survive.
But he refused. What prevented him, he later said, was thinking about the families of his workers. Many of the coopers had applied their trade at Garbellotto for generations. They were fathers and sons and grandsons, working side by side, passing the secrets of wood selection and fire-bending through apprenticeships and lived experience.
Instead of laying them off, Pietro reached into the family’s coffers and paid full salaries. He kept every worker on the payroll. With no barrels to build, the coopers maintained the factory by repairing equipment, tending the wood yards, and preserving the six-hectare lumberyard where oak is seasoned in the open air for eight months per centimeter of thickness.
Of course, the company hemorrhaged cash. It was, by any conventional financial measure, a disaster.
Betting on quality
To an American reader, this might sound like a quaint form of capitalist patronage: the benevolent patriarch keeping the peasants fed. But Pietro wasn’t being sentimental so much as he was being strategic. Two hundred years of institutional memory had taught him something simple: The cycle always returns to quality. And when it did, he intended to be ready. It was a drought, yes. But the rains would return.
In 1980, they did. The Gallo family, Italian-American winemakers from Modesto, California, arrived in Europe looking for a cooperage capable of building giant aging vats for their winery. They needed 712 of them, each over 12 feet tall. It was the largest single order in the history of the cooperage industry, and the Gallo family needed a company with the skilled labor, the seasoned wood, and the institutional knowledge to execute it.
By this point, many of Garbellotto’s competitors were gone. But Garbellotto had its coopers and its wood. It had everything intact — in fact, updated — because Pietro had the foresight (and the faith) to protect it.
It is, at its core, a philosophy about the irreducible value of other people.
The Gallo commission took five years to complete and, in the end, saved the company. In the decades since, Garbellotto has grown into the oldest and most renowned cooperage in the world. It is still family-owned and still in the Veneto, where Piero Garbellotto and his brothers Piergregorio and Pieremilio now lead as the eighth generation.
Lose the people, lose the company
There is a local proverb that Pietro Garbellotto used to repeat to his children and to anyone who would listen: Sa più el Papa e un contadin che el Papa solo. The Pope and a peasant know more than the Pope alone.
It is, at its core, a philosophy about the irreducible value of other people. And it sits at the center of why this company has survived for 251 years while virtually every competitor has disappeared.
The family has long called their approach vincere con: “winning with.” The idea is that enduring success, whether in business, relationships, or investing, comes from arrangements where both parties benefit. Think back to 1978.
When Pietro kept his coopers employed through the zero-order year, he was operating on a longer time horizon than most, and that became the company’s greatest strength: preserving irreplaceable knowledge. Of course, he also had the financial ability to do it.
Garbellotto had always been prudent with cash, holding more reserves than they strictly needed. There was slack in the system because they understood that survival sometimes demands resources that look inefficient on a balance sheet.
The cash was one element of their survival, but the deeper belief in what they were doing — and the courage to keep spending it in the face of total uncertainty — was another. And really, what made that courage rational was the nature of who they were protecting. These were not interchangeable laborers on a payroll. They were master craftsmen whose families had spent decades, sometimes generations, accumulating knowledge that existed nowhere else. The manufacture of barrels, as the family has always maintained, is an art that can only be transmitted from master to apprentice, generation to generation, through proximity and patience.
Lose the people, and you lose the company. It’s that simple.
Consider the cooper Giovanni Bottega, who started at the factory at fourteen, became Pietro’s personal driver, and later taught the craft to Pietro’s own children during their summer apprenticeships. Bottega was ashamed of a cleft lip. Pietro told him only ignorant people notice such things, then found a specialist in Bologna and paid for the surgery himself. When Bottega bought a house, Pietro helped with that, too.
Today, Bottega’s son works at Garbellotto, having taken his father’s place.
That trust — between worker and owner — has compounded over centuries, and it has repaid itself in ways no balance sheet could fully capture.
Later in his life, Pietro wrote down the principles that governed life at Garbellotto in what he called the Regolieri — an exhaustive, continuously updated set of rules covering workmanship, behavior, safety, and even preparation for generational succession.
In over two centuries of operation, the company has never experienced a single minute of labor strike.
The craft will always be human
Piero Garbellotto, the current CEO and eighth-generation steward, grew up playing in the factory. He rode forklifts between barrel stacks as a child and spent his summers from age fourteen as an apprentice cooper. He describes the work as a vocation, not a career choice. What strikes me most about Piero is his restlessness about the future.
Piero is always learning. He is always looking for the person — the scientist, the enologist, the supplier — who can teach him something he doesn’t yet know.
For example, one problem that obsessed him for years was variability. Ten barrels could be built from the same wood of the same origin, but each could produce a different aromatic result. He refused to accept this, and eventually found an answer from an unlikely source: a chance conversation with Professor Battistutta at a conference in Puglia.
Battistutta explained that every tree feeds differently depending on its exact position in the soil and the particular nutrients it absorbed during its lifetime. Two oaks from the same forest can carry entirely different aromatic profiles. Piero heard this and set off to build a new technology around the idea.
The result was the Botti Barrique NIR system, now an internationally patented technology that uses near-infrared spectroscopy — enhanced by artificial intelligence — to analyze every individual stave for its precise aromatic composition before it is ever assembled into a barrel. The system categorizes each plank by its concentration of tannins, vanillin, and eugenol, and discards wood that would produce off-flavors. Garbellotto is the only cooperage in the world that can guarantee not just a watertight barrel, but a specific aromatic result — and estimate how long that result will last.
They named their new facility Intelligenza Artigianale. Artisanal Intelligence.
Garbellotto will use every tool available, from infrared spectroscopy to AI to digital monitoring, to get better at their craft. But the craft itself will always be human. The fire-bending is still done by hand, exactly as it has been for thousands of years, but a Digital Toasting System now uses infrared cameras to monitor internal temperature in real time, feeding data to a computer that adjusts airflow to maintain a precise toasting curve.
The system serves the craftsman, but the craftsman does not serve the system. That distinction is part of why the quality is so good, and human judgment is what separates a barrel that ages wine from a barrel that transforms it.
In a recent interview, Piero put it this way: “One of the things I love most about this trade, working alongside my family, is this constant passage back and forth between antiquity and the most modern technologies.”
That passage back and forth is the point. And it should give us pause in a moment when so much of the business world is racing to replace human judgment with machine intelligence. Garbellotto uses AI to read the aromatic profile of a stave. But AI didn’t keep the factory open in 1978, nor did an algorithm pay the coopers’ salaries when there were no orders. And when the next crisis comes, as it always does, it will be the depth of those relationships, and not the sophistication of the machinery, that will determine whether a company survives.
It is worth asking yourself the same question. When the downturn arrives — and it will — who are you going to call? Which person? And will they pick up? The answer depends entirely on how you treated them before you needed them.
This article The 250-year-old company that survived by refusing to lay people off is featured on Big Think.
