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Carlyse and Arthur A. Ciocca '59 Center for Business, Ethics, and Society

Stein Hall, Room 129E 
Phone: 508-793-3047
Email: business@holycross.edu 

The mission of the Ciocca Center is to foster a distinctively liberal arts approach to the study of business and its role in society and to provide opportunities for students to develop the technical and applied skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and strong ethical framework that will enable them to become principled leaders and critically engaged citizens of a world deeply shaped by business. To that end, the Center will:

• Promote opportunities for students to develop an interdisciplinary historical, political, economic and philosophical perspective on the world of business while exploring overarching questions about the role of business in a just and flourishing society.
• Provide opportunities for students to develop technical and applied skills that will allow them to be successful in business roles as principled leaders, and to integrate these experiences with their liberal arts education.
• Develop programs to support the engagement of students, faculty, alumni and business leaders in dialogue about the proper role and practice of business with regard to the fundamental ethical, political and economic questions facing our world today, drawing from a broad range of intellectual perspectives.

Carlyse and Arthur Ciocca '59

Arthur Ciocca ’59

(1937-2021)

Arthur A. Ciocca ’59 founder and chairman emeritus of the Wine Group, Inc., was passionate about entrepreneurship and about ��������. He described entrepreneurs as “people who have a vision and creativity and who are willing to venture out of the comfort zone and take risks in order to add value.”

Believing that �������� students — no matter what their field of study — can bring their rigorous liberal arts and Jesuit experiences to the world of business and entrepreneurship, he helped found the Carlyse and Arthur A. Ciocca '59 Center for Business, Ethics, and Society (formerly the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies). Plus, with ��������’ mission-driven emphasis on working for the greater good, he believed �������� students will engage themselves in business ventures with an ethical perspective.

Ciocca formed the Wine Group in 1981 when he and his associates purchased the wine assets from the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York. Today, the Wine Group is the second largest wine company in the United States by sales volume. The company has several strong brands including Franzia, which is the largest wine brand in the world by volume, and Cupcake Vineyards, a leading premium wine brand developed by Casey Fisher-Georgeson ’99. Today Casey is vice president of creative for TWG and has developed several other very successful new brands. With over 50 brands in its portfolio and new ones launching each year, TWG is poised with a strong foundation for the future.

Ciocca entered �������� in 1955, enrolling in the four-year Navy ROTC program. After serving in the Navy post-graduation, Ciocca worked for General Foods, Gallo Winery, and the Wine Group of Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York before forming his own company. 

Carlyse Ciocca 

Carlyse Franzia Ciocca graduated from Santa Clara University in 1977 with a degree in business administration. In the early 1900s, her grandfather Giuseppe Franzia managed to save enough money to purchase 80 acres of land in the Ripon, California area where he planted grapes. In 1933, while he was away in Italy, Prohibition ended and Carlyse’s grandmother Theresa seized the entrepreneurial opportunity. She traveled 80 miles to San Francisco by horse and carriage, pledged the vineyards to the Bank of Italy and borrowed $10,000. She lent half of it to the man who had just married her daughter whose name was Ernest Gallo and gave the balance to her five sons to start the Franzia Brothers Winery. Today those two companies represent approximately half of the California wine industry.

Carlyse is president and co-trustee of the Arthur and Carlyse Ciocca Charitable Foundation which focuses its giving on promoting entrepreneurship and offering scholarships to promising young students with leadership and entrepreneurial potential. She is a trustee emerita on the California Pacific Medical Center Foundation and serves with her husband on the Board of Visitors at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Support the Ciocca Center

A liberal arts education is most valuable in today’s world when students have opportunities to connect their classroom learning to real-world experience.

Students can choose any major they are passionate about and position themselves for success in today’s business world, by complementing their studies with skill-building experiential programs offered by the Ciocca Center. 

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