Kyle Krause & Nico Conta are a lot alike — smart, stylish and super at selling Italian wine & culture.

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

CANALE, Italy — I’d pay a good price to sit in and listen to a conversation between Kyle Krause, the Iowa guy who has become a business leader in Italy, too, and Nico Conta, the Italian guy whom Krause hired to be president of the Enrico Serafino winery, which Krause bought here in 2015.

They seem a whole lot alike. Krause is 62, Conta is 61. Both grew up in small towns — Krause in Hampton, Iowa, pop. 4,300, Conta in Nizza Monferrato, Italy, pop. 10,050.

Both are third or fourth generation entrepreneurs. Krause’s earlier success in the U.S. has been in convenience stores, trucking, banking and farm ownership. Conta followed his grandfather and father into wine production, and he’s been running wineries the second half of his own career.

Both are smart, courageous, stylish and have deep love for both Italian wine and Italian culture. Krause’s maternal great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from the Palermo area of Italy.

“Kyle is teaching me English, and I am teaching him Italian,” Conta said in an interview last week in his offices. “So I started to teach him this old Italian farm saying, ‘I know my chickens!’ But I think he already knew what it meant.”

What I was most interested in hearing from Conta is what he thought of Krause when they first met, and did he have any doubts about a businessman from Iowa being able oversee the operations of a historic winery in Italy?

“I knew he was successful in his businesses, and I quickly learned that he is an absolute connoisseur of wine,” Conta said. “He was more aware of our wine industry here than many of our own people in it are.

“And I found from the very start of our conversations, a very strong connection from Kyle and his family with what our founder Serafino Enrico had when he started this business in 1878.”

(Yes, the founder’s name actually was Serafino Enrico, but way back that was transposed in the company’s name, which has always been Enrico Serafino.)

So, what was that connection — the thing that both Kyle Krause and Serafino Enrico had in common?

“We call it the ‘Piedmont Attitude’,” Conta said. “We live in Italy’s Piemonte Region, which has always been known for its wine making. Going back to our grandmothers here, they believed in using the natural resources we have right here, insisting on higher quality in our production, using advancements in technology, marketing our wine around the world, and by doing that we lift the standard of living of our people.

“I think that is kind of how the Krause family has operated in their businesses in the U.S., isn’t it?”

When the Enrico Serafino winery was starting up in the late 1870s, the standard business practice was that a winery could sell no farther than about 250 kilometers from its location. However, when the founder saw railroads developing and sailing ships were navigating the globe, he decided there was no reason he couldn’t sell his wine at far away ports.

In 1910, he sent cases of his wine to the Emperor of China. When the founder died in 1918, he had cases on the way to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who liked it so much that in 1919, he visited the winery on his way to the Conference of Versailles, in France, where the terms of peace after World War I were negotiated.

What has really made Enrico Serafino wine, Conta said, “is our soil and all that is in it. That makes our land so productive for grapes, fruit, truffles, hazelnuts and more.

“You know, they say that the artist Michelangelo said he could look at a big block of marble and could actually see the sculpture ‘David’ that he would eventually carve from it. We feel that same way about our soil. We can look at it, touch it, and know the quality of the wine it can produce.”

Enrico Serafino today has 10 full-time employees and a varying number of contracted workers producing 350,000 bottles of wine per year. They use grapes from 25 hectares of their own land and another 60 hectares they have rented for decades.

The founder’s family ran the company for its first 100 years. Since 1978, five other families — now the Krauses — have owned it.

Conta said three of the most important things that any winery owner must bring to the business are “consistency, understanding the rules of the industry, appreciating that producing and aging good wine requires patience, and then some good luck, too. I think Kyle has all of those.”

And one thing he and Krause both particularly like in the business?

“Our customers can enjoy our wine better if they value the Italian culture,” Conta said. “We are working all the time in communicating that, especially now to younger generations coming up.”