A machinery salesman who found the still.

Capovilla is the work of one man and his nickname. Vittorio “Gianni” Capovilla, known as “Capo,” founded the distillery in the province of Vicenza in 1986, Il Sole 24 Ore reported in February 2019. Before that he worked with machinery for winemaking: in the 1970s, il Giornale reported in February 2024, he sold oenology equipment and travelled around Europe, finding in Switzerland, Germany and Austria a culture of distillation much deeper than the one he knew at home in Italy’s north-east.

According to Il Sole 24 Ore, he began distilling as a hobby with a 60-litre bain-marie still bought in Austria and turned professional in 1986. il Giornale says he started with grape pomace he selected himself and then moved to what became his real passion, fruit.

The distillery today is at Rosà, in the province of Vicenza, where the company’s website gives its address and invites visitors to tastings by appointment, on weekdays, with visits suspended from November to January. The website speaks of “a journey that has lasted more than 30 years,” and opens with a line signed by “il Capo”: the better the fruit, the better the final product, and with exceptional fruit “the only risk is that of ruining it.”

Spontaneous fermentation, double distillation.

The company calls what it makes “only pure distillates”: not infusions or liqueurs, but fermented fruit distilled, needing from 30 to 60 kilograms of raw material for a litre of spirit at full strength, it says. Its website sets out a six-stage “Capovilla Method.” Fruit is picked ripe, from its own fields or from trusted growers; it ferments spontaneously with its own native yeasts, with only the temperature adjusted; it is distilled twice in copper stills heated in a bain-marie, a water bath; it rests in stainless steel; some spirits age in small barrels; and it is brought to strength with spring water.

Il Sole 24 Ore described the same principle in 2019: Capovilla turns the fruit into a purée, lets it ferment on its own and then distils it, rather than flavouring a neutral spirit. The paper said he had tried distilling nearly 150 of the more than 1,000 varieties of apple, and that he grew about three hectares of rare plants and worked with farmers who pointed him to interesting trees. In 2024 il Giornale put the farm at four hectares, said family and friends forage wild berries for him, and said he has had machines built specially for some stages of production; apricots and peaches, he explained, are crushed without breaking the stone and then stoned by a second machine.

The range is wide. il Giornale listed distillates of orchard fruit — apples, quince, Williams and Buona Luisa pears, cherries, apricots, peaches and mirabelle plums — and of wild fruit such as rowan, elderberry, blackberry and cornel cherries, as well as distillates of grape and of beer, and grappas from wines including Amarone, Nebbiolo and Brunello. It also reported that Capovilla has the pomace for some of them destemmed in Champagne, at houses such as Philipponnat and Billecart-Salmon.

The website frames all of this in the words of others as well as its own. Its page on method opens with a line from Luigi Veronelli, the Italian food and wine writer — “if you don’t do what you do, no one will do it” — and the site carries a short film, “il Capo,” offered with Italian, English, French and German subtitles. Grape spirits in the range, il Giornale reported, include distillates of fragolino and of Moscato Fior d’Arancio.

Fruit brandy and eau-de-vie.

The seven brands in this group are all calvados and fruit-spirit names: Roger Groult, Adrien Camut, Massenez, Schladerer, Reisetbauer, Capovilla and Clear Creek. Calvados and fruit-spirit distillers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A calvados or fruit-spirit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirits are actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirits are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Small volumes, plain bottles, one name.

Capovilla has stayed small. Il Sole 24 Ore put its output in 2019 at about 50,000 bottles a year, half of them exported. The company’s own name, Capovilla Distillati, is the one that appears on its website, and the 2024 il Giornale profile presented Gianni Capovilla, working with his family, as still running the business he founded; it described an “azienda culto,” a cult company, whose bottles are “essential, almost naked,” and quoted him saying he does not go looking for customers — they choose him. The Venice restaurant Local, the paper reported, pairs his distillates with its food.

The same approach has travelled. il Giornale quoted Capovilla saying that in 2005 he went to Marie-Galante, in Guadeloupe, met Dominique Thiery, and sent the technology there for a year of experiments, with the first official production released in 2007: an agricole rum made from fresh cane juice and, like the fruit spirits, distilled twice in a bain-marie. The paper also reported plans for distillates of tropical fruit.

For a design guide, Capovilla shows how a distillery can make plainness its signature, with the founder’s method doing the work a label usually does. Compare Nardini, the grappa house on the bridge at Bassano del Grappa, in the same province, and Nonino, the Friulian grappa family. For this guide we use cornel red, quince gold and leaf green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Capovilla’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.