Guest Blogger: Chris Manganaro
Family
businesses nowadays are far less common than they were in the past.
It used to be that all over the world children would help out their
parents on the farm or in the store in order to take over for them
when they were gone. It was a nice security blanket for families.
Even now there are families lucky enough to have this, but just as in
the past, sometimes these are opportunities that are not taken
advantage of.
In
the book Passion
on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy
by Sergio Esposito, the topic of family businesses is brought up a
few times in his narrative about his growing passion for wine. As a
man who believes in tradition, he seems to believe strongly in the
idea of children inheriting the family business. He even wants his
son to have a love of wine. He does not force the idea down the
readers throat, but rather subtly suggests it through a few
situations that he brings up in his narrative.
One
such situation is that of a family who owns a vineyard and whose
daughter decides to go off to college. She never took too much
interest in the work, yet decided to take over the business after
graduating after all, rather than see her family get rid of all they
had worked for. On the other side of this is a story of a family in
which the son always wanted to continue the work on the family farm
and decided to give up on continuing his education in order to do so.
Esposito relates these cases in such a way that he is not
necessarily pushing his view, but rather appreciating the results of
the stories he has heard. The way he does this is how he tends to
write throughout the book. It is a slightly detached way of writing,
but it actually does a lot more in the long run than fully involving
himself in everything. As with wine, it helps to develop the flavor
of the book. Esposito does a wonderful job of demonstrating the
beauty of the family business.
