Giuseppe Bonollo, his son Umberto and a move to Conselve.

The grappa sold as Bonollo comes from Distillerie Bonollo Umberto, a family company in the province of Padua in Veneto. The company says its story begins in January 1908 at Fara Vicentino, with the earliest distillation declaration signed by Giuseppe Bonollo, and its labels and website still carry the words “Bonollo 1908.” Gambero Rosso International, in a 2021 profile, describes Giuseppe as the founder who experimented with a steam still in 1908, aiming for a grappa with a better sensory profile than traditional ones.

The company in its present form dates from the next generation. Gambero Rosso International says that in 1951 Giuseppe’s son Umberto Bonollo continued the business with his own children and set up in the Padua area. The company’s timeline places that first distillery at Mestrino and says it moved to Conselve, south of Padua, in 1964. Both towns are still part of the business: Il Sole 24 Ore reported in June 2024 that the company runs two plants in the province, the distillery at Conselve and a site at Mestrino, and a case study by the scanner maker Datalogic describes Conselve as the place where grappa, grape spirits and brandy are made and Mestrino as the site where liqueurs are produced and the spirits are bottled.

The third generation shaped much of what the company is now. Il Sole 24 Ore reported that Antonio “Tonino” Bonollo, a board member who had spent more than 70 years in distilling, learned the trade from his grandfather Giuseppe, and it credited him and his brothers Giuseppe, Dario, Amedeo and Bruno with pioneering double distillation in the 1970s. The same newspaper reported his death in June 2024 and said the company remained in the family’s hands, with the fourth generation now involved. The company also says that in 1972 Giuseppe Bonollo of the third generation distilled the local Friularo grape on its own, an early single-variety grappa.

A barrique grappa from Amarone pomace, a decanter and a restyle.

The product most closely tied to the Bonollo name is OF Amarone Barrique, a grappa distilled from the pomace of Amarone, the dried-grape red wine of Valpolicella, and aged in small barrels. The company says the first bottle was released in December 1999, and Il Sole 24 Ore marked the grappa’s 25th year in September 2024. Around it the company has built a family of “OF” spirits, including OF Dorange and OF Amaro, and it sells its other grappas under ranges such as Ligneum, for reserves aged in tonneaux, and Le Giovani Eccellenze.

OF is also where Bonollo’s design story is clearest. The bottle is a decanter, which Il Sole 24 Ore says has been the brand’s distinctive element since the 1990s. In 2024 the company gave it a restyle. Elvio Bonollo, of the fourth generation, told the paper that the project had begun almost three years earlier and was carried out with the branding agency Robilant Associati. He said the team revisited the decanter with “soft but decisive” lines meant to convey authority, composure and preciousness, and reworked the stopper and the base plate, which recalls a still. Milano Finanza described the result in December 2024 as a slimmer bottle with a golden stopper and said the grappa inside was unchanged.

Colour does the work of separating the line. Il Sole 24 Ore reported that the restyle was carried across the sister products, with orange tones for OF Dorange and green for OF Amaro, a nod to its botanicals, and that the new campaign runs under the pay-off “Taste OF Beauty,” a line that now heads the company’s website. The company says the 2024 work also covered a wider restyling of the Bonollo brand and its content.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian grappa names: Berta, Mazzetti d’Altavilla, Marzadro, Bocchino, Sibona, Castagner and Bonollo. Grappa is a spirit distilled from pomace, the skins, seeds and pulp left over once grapes have been pressed for wine, so a grappa house depends on the wineries around it, and its range is often organised by grape variety, by the wine the pomace came from, or by how long the spirit has spent in wood.

Many grappa houses still carry a family name, and several of the brands here are linked to the northern regions where much of Italy’s grappa is made, including Veneto, Trentino and Piedmont. A family name on a label does not on its own say who owns the business today, where the pomace is distilled or where the bottles are filled, and a single surname can belong to more than one company.

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

Pomace, by-products and a family name shared with another distiller.

Bonollo presents its method as the Sistema Unico Bonollo, which the company says covers every stage from collecting fresh pomace to packaging. On its website it describes steam passing through the pomace, a master distiller separating heads and tails to keep the heart, an optional second distillation it calls “ripasso,” and both batch and continuous stills, followed by ageing in wood in cellars under customs seal.

The company also sells what is left over. It says spent pomace yields calcium tartrate, the raw material for tartaric acid, that grape seeds are pressed for an edible oil, and that the skins go mainly into animal feed and partly into its own boilers. In April 2023 the Conselve distillery opened a biomethane plant built with the gas network operator Italgas; Il Sole 24 Ore reported on 15 April 2023 that it is connected to the gas grid and fed by liquid residues from distillation.

The company has also added older brands. It says it bought the historic names Modin in 1978, Dalla Vecchia in 1982 and Ballor in 2015; Ballor, whose own site dates it to Turin in 1856, now sells a gin, an amaro and a vermouth.

One naming note matters when searching. Distillerie Bonollo of Formigine, near Modena, is a separate distilling group with plants in Emilia, Lazio and Tuscany; Gambero Rosso International says it also traces its origins to Giuseppe Bonollo in 1908, through his son Luigi. The OF grappas and the “Bonollo 1908” labels belong to the Padua company of Umberto’s line.

For a design guide, Bonollo shows how a grappa house can let one bottle — a decanter with a still-shaped base and a golden stopper — stand for the whole family name, and then use colour to stretch it across a line. Compare Nardini, the Bassano grappa house on the old bridge, and Capovilla, the Veneto distiller of fruit spirits. For this guide we use Amarone garnet, still copper and stopper gold with a display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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